American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993

American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993

This major new textbook brings together twelve of the leading scholars of US foreign relations. Each contributor provides a clear, concise summary of an important period or theme in US diplomatic and strategic affairs since the Spanish-American War. Michael H.Hunt and Joan Hoff provide an overview of the traditions behind US policy and a preview of things to come. Together, the contributors offer a succinct explanation of the controversies and questions that historians have grappled with throughout the twentieth century. Students will find these essays a reliable and useful guide to the various schools of thought that have emerged. Although each of the scholars is well known for their detailed and original work, these essays are new and have been specially commissioned for this book. The articles follow the chronological development of the emergence of the United States as a world power, but special themes such as the American policy process, economic interests, relations with the Third World, and the dynamics of the nuclear arms race have been singled out for separate treatment. American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993 represents essential reading for upper-level undergraduates studying modern American history. The book has been designed and written exclusively to meet the needs of students, either as a major course text, or as a set of supplementary readings to support other texts. Gordon Martel is Professor of History and Chair at the University of Northern British Columbia and Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort University. He is the editor of The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (1986), Modern Germany Reconsidered, 1870–1945 (1992) and of The New International History series also published by Routledge.

American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993

Edited by Gordon Martel

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Gordon Martel for editorial material; individual chapters © contributors, 1994 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data American foreign relations reconsidered, 1890–1993/edited by Gordon Martel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. United States—Foreign relations—20th century. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1865–1898. I. Martel, Gordon. E744.A5327 1994 327.73–dc20 93–36339 ISBN 0-203-42591-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-73415-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-10476-9 (hbk) 0-415-10477-7 (pbk)

for: Eric, Jim & Maurice —who know great power when they see it

Contents

1

2

Notes on contributors Preface

ix xi

Traditions of American diplomacy: from colony to great power Michael H.Hunt

1

“They don’t come out where you expect”: institutions of American diplomacy and the policy process J.Garry Clifford

21

3

Economic interest and United States foreign policy Emily S.Rosenberg

37

4

Imperialism, American style, 1890–1916 Joseph A.Fry

52

5

Wilsonian diplomacy in war and peace John W.Coogan

71

6

The triumph of isolationism Thomas N.Guinsburg

90

7

The interpretive wars over the Cold War, 1945–60 Melvyn P.Leffler

106

8

From Kennedy to Nixon: the end of consensus Russell D.Buhite

125

9

From détente to the Gulf Walter LaFeber

145

10

The United States and the rise of the Third World Dennis Merrill

166

11

Reconsidering the nuclear arms race: the past as prelude? James G.Hershberg

187

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American diplomacy: retrospect and prospect Joan Hoff

211

Bibliography Index

234 259

Notes on contributors

Russell D.Buhite is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at the University of Missouri at Rolla. He is the author, in addition to other works, of Patrick J.Hurley and American Foreign Policy: Soviet-American Relations in Asia, 1945–54; and Decisions at Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy. J.Garry Clifford is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1914–1920. He has co-authored The First Peacetime Draft with Samuel R.Spencer, Jr, and American Foreign Policy: A History with Thomas G.Paterson and Kenneth J.Hagan. He is currently working on a study of Franklin D.Roosevelt and American entry into World War II. John W.Coogan is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 and is currently at work on a sequel, “The Practical Joke on Myself ”: The Doctrine of Freedom of the Seas in AngloAmerican Relations, 1915–1921. Joseph A.Fry is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Henry S.Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in NineteenthCentury America and John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy. Thomas N.Guinsburg is Professor of History at The University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Pursuit of Isolationism in the United States Senate from Versailles to Pearl Harbor and of several articles on isolationism between the wars, and is the editor of The Dimensions of History. James G.Hershberg is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of James B.Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. ix

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Joan Hoff is Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and wrote the essay in this collection while the Mary Ball Washington Chair in American History at University College, Dublin. She is the author of American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933; Ideology and Economics: United States Relations with the Soviet Union, 1918–1933; Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive; and Nixon Without Watergate: A Presidency Reconsidered. Michael H.Hunt is Emerson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are Lyndon Johnson s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968, Crises in US Foreign Policy: An International History Reader and The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy. Walter LaFeber is the Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992; The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750; and Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, among other works. Melvyn P.Leffler is Stettinius Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Spectre of Communism: The US and the Origins of the Cold War 1917–53. His other works include The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–33 and A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Dennis Merrill is Associate Professor of History and Chair at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is author of Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963, and co-editor of the forthcoming edition of Major Problems in American Foreign Relations. He has twice visited India on Fulbright Fellowships and sits on the editorial board of Diplomatic History. He is currently working on a history of US foreign aid programs and development policies in South Asia during the Cold War. Emily S.Rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. She is the author of Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945; World War I and the Growth of United States Predominance in Latin America; and co-author (with Norman L.Rosenberg) of In Our Times: America Since 1945.

Preface

This is the third collection of “Reconsiderations,” the first of which dealt with A.J.P.Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War. The aim of the present book, like the first one, is fairly simple: to serve undergraduate students taking courses in the history of US foreign relations. The origins of the first book reveal how this ambition was conceived and, hopefully, realized: in an attempt to demonstrate R.G.Collingwood’s concept of “secondary history” to a class of first-year history students, I had them first read Taylor’s Origins and then a series of reviews, articles and books written on the subject since he wrote. This experiment proved to be a great success, as students were challenged by his provocative interpretation and eager to see how professionally trained historians reacted to it. Thus, both the nature and the value of historical debates were demonstrated to students who could also test Collingwood’s hypothesis that it was the secondary history of a subject with which one should begin. What I found to be difficult and frustrating was the process of putting together a coherent and accessible set of readings for my students to consider; the best that I could do was to collect a miscellany of materials that varied considerably in size, scope, and style, and which were cumbersome to use. With this in mind I approached a number of leading historians of the subject to see if they would be interested in writing essays on various aspects of Taylor’s interpretation and to talk about the responses to it and the “state of the art” of the debate today. Simultaneously, I found a receptive and enthusiastic editor in Jane Harris-Matthews of Allen & Unwin, who was convinced of the utility of such a book. Her assessment has proved accurate, and that first book is now used regularly in undergraduate history courses around the world. The original formula was expanded upon for the next book, Modern Germany Reconsidered, which was not tied to any one historian or interpretation. But the aim remained similar: to provide students with clear and accessible summaries of the most important controversies and developments in the interpretation of German history from 1870 to 1945, and thus to enable both instructors and students to overcome the limitations imposed by reliance upon a single-author survey of the period, a form which usually leaves little room for a discussion of debates. xi

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Preface

The essays in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered are not intended to be “original” in themselves, and I am indebted to the distinguished contributors who were willing to forgo originality for the sake of producing a book that would be useful for students. They apparently share my conviction that there are some important gaps in the literature between the textbook and the monograph. If this book proves to be a useful one it will be owing to the commitment of these scholars to their craft, and I sincerely thank each of them. Gordon Martel Royal Roads Military College March 1993

1

Traditions of American diplomacy: from colony to great power Michael H.Hunt

The foreign policy of the United States between independence and World War I has attracted the attention of several generations of historians, each intent on relating that early era to the policy of their own time. At first historians saw a predestined, triumphal march toward world power by a virtuous people. Accounts shifted for a time to a decidedly less celebratory mode, stressing the lapse into national isolation and passivity after the heroic era of the struggle for independence. Long free-loaders, dependent on the British fleet for their security, Americans entered the twentieth century (so this version of the rise to world power went) unprepared for its challenges. Most recently, historians have drawn attention to the strains of arrogance and anxiety that ran through the first century and a half of American foreign relations. Oppression of native Americans, deceit and manipulation by political leaders, and a seemingly insatiable hunger for land and foreign markets top a long list of disagreeable features defining nineteenth-century expansion.1 Today the whiff of decline is in the air. The American military giant faces distracting, perhaps even disabling, social and economic problems at home as well as uncertainties about its future role in the world.2 Now more awake to the fact that great powers cannot forever sustain their predominance, we are perhaps ready to look afresh at the beginnings of the great cycle—the period during which the United States rose with astonishing swiftness from vulnerable new nation to a place of international prominence. In our fin de siècle mood, this extraordinary transformation invites sober contemplation and serious analysis for what it may tell us about how we have reached our present, problematic position and where we may go from here. THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN POWER The obvious starting point for explaining the rise of the United States as a great power is the base of material wealth that Americans were able to build in a relatively short time. Seizing the opportunities created by the British-dominated international economy. Americans profited from a flourishing foreign trade, primarily in agricultural products and raw materials. Accumulated capital went 1

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into a domestic industry whose growth had by 1830 established the United States in sixth place among industrial powers. By the 1890s American industrial output was second to none. In 1900, for example, iron and steel production roughly equalled the combined figure for Britain and Germany.3 By the early twentieth century the United States had, judging by the usual indices, largely completed its ascent. A population of only three million in 1783 and thirty-two million in 1860 had climbed to ninety-eight million by 1914. The people of the United States by then occupied a continent secure from any proximate military threat and rich in natural wealth. By 1914 the United States had far outstripped all the major powers in national as well as per capita income: Britain, the closest competitor, had only one-third the national income ($11 billion vs $37 billion) and two-thirds the per capita income ($244 vs $377). Indeed, on the eve of World War I the national incomes of all the European powers combined (including Russia) exceeded that of the United States by only a small margin ($4 billion).4 By then the US navy stood third in the world, just behind the British and the German fleets. While internal developments were critical to the American success story, changes in the international setting were also important. The prolonged Anglo-French struggle for international hegemony placed major obstacles in the way of American expansion between 1776 and 1815. First as a colony, then as a nominally independent state, Americans sought to make good on their claim to independence, protect their commerce, and secure their territorial control in the face of British imperial pretensions and recurrent international crises. Even after abandoning formal control of the Thirteen Colonies, British policymakers tried to keep the new state weak by containing the United States within a narrow coastal strip, by maintaining its commercial dependence on the British Isles, and by monopolizing its maritime and natural resources during wartime. Even so, from the beginning Americans were able (in the memorable and telling phrase of Samuel Flagg Bemis) to draw advantage from Europe’s distress.5 Locked in competition with each other, the European powers were constrained in their dealings with the United States by the broad Atlantic, limited budgets, and war-weary populations. If American policy-makers exercised patience, they would find the moment when those powers, distracted by problems close to home, could be driven to settle on terms advantageous to the United States. Where diplomacy failed, even when backed by a growing population of Americans in disputed territories, policy-makers could try stronger medicine: threatening an alliance with one European power against its rival, grabbing weakly defended territories of distant European antagonists or, in extremity, resorting to armed force—and thereby exploiting the advantage of fighting on home ground. The British were the first to give way, conceding independence in 1783 after discovering that their rebellious subjects, backed by the French, were difficult to defeat on their own soil. But London persisted in its bullying after 1783, setting off a second war with the Americans in 1812. This time the British were

Traditions of American diplomacy

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forced to recognize that even their vaunted sea power was not enough to overcome the formidable difficulties of waging war across the Atlantic, and that they would have to accept Canada’s status as a hostage to American good will. Slowly, the British were forced to concede the dominance of the American republic on the continent. In 1846 London accepted a compromise division of the Pacific Northwest (the Oregon territory) and showed a general deference through the balance of the century in handling a series of potentially explosive maritime cases and disputes over the US-Canadian border. Indeed, so formidable had the United States become that, even when Americans found themselves engaged in a civil war between 1861 and 1865, neither Britain nor any other major European power dared risk the lasting American enmity that intervention would bring.6 Other powers also gave ground. Napoleon sold France’s Louisiana territory in 1803 to make ready for a renewal of his struggle against Britain. A weakened Spain gave up Florida under duress in 1819, a prelude to its expulsion from all but a fragment of its holdings in the Americas. Mexico failed to pacify expatriate Americans who had taken control of its northern territory (Texas), and then watched helplessly as they joined their land to the United States in 1845. With the American army occupying its capital in 1848, Mexico again had to submit, this time surrendering almost half of its territory as the price of peace. In 1867 Russia liquidated the last of its holdings in the Americas by selling Alaska. In 1898 Spain’s turn came again, giving up Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to American control.7 The resistance from native Americans entrenched in pockets across the continent proved even easier to overcome than the imperialism of the Europeans. Diminished by diseases borne by the European intruders, outmatched by their technology, and overwhelmed by their burgeoning population, native Americans put up a long and stubborn resistance. But the resulting battles ended ever more frequently in defeat of native forces, while alliances with Britain or France against their common enemy repeatedly collapsed as the European powers staged their own reluctant but inexorable retreat. Native attempts at accommodation with Washington ended in political betrayals that were no less disastrous. Whatever their choice, the ultimate outcome was a loss of land and relocation to distant, barren “reservations.”8 The turning points in the subjugation of native Americans roughly coincided with the European withdrawal. By 1815 the United States had begun to establish military dominance over indigenous peoples, and the last spark of their resistance flickered out in the 1890s, just as Spain surrendered the final vestiges of its empire and British policymakers came to terms with US supremacy in the hemisphere as a whole. Approximately two to ten million people lived north of the Rio Grande before the first European settlements; by 1900 they were a defeated, dispirited remnant.9 No longer a troublesome foreign policy problem, native Americans could now be quietly set aside as wards of the federal government.

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The cumulative effect of these developments on American expansion was impressive. The territorial extent of the United States had quadrupled in the first half century of independence. The settlements hugging the Atlantic coast, augmented by lands acquired in the 1783 peace, carried the country to the Mississippi River. The Louisiana purchase doubled American territory by adding a vast expanse west of the Mississippi. The succession of acquisitions between 1845 and 1853 rounded out the continental base. The total cost of expansion was three wars and the payment of $48 million. From this position of continental strength and security, the United States advanced additional claims which, before long, became global. In 1823 President Monroe had decreed limits on the European role in the Americas, and in the latter third of the century American presidents enforced those limits. In 1898 the McKinley administration humbled Spain in war and seized its remaining Caribbean possessions. Washington annexed Puerto Rico, imposed a protectorate over Cuba, and proceeded to make the Caribbean an American lake, launching repeated interventions over the following two decades in order to block European interlopers or keep order among the “natives.”10 At the same time that Americans were establishing hegemony in the Caribbean they were extending their influence across the Pacific, which they thought of both as a road to Asia and as a moat guarding the United States. This thinking prompted naval expeditions to open Japan and Korea to trade, the acquisition of Midway Island in 1867, and the seizure of Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island, as well as portions of Samoa and the Philippines at the close of the century. With these Pacific way-stations in place, Washington demanded of the other powers a voice in the economic and political future of China, and backed those demands in 1900 by sending troops to restore order in north China. Just as the United States was becoming a Pacific power, it was also taking the first tentative steps toward involvement in European politics. The seizure of colonies and the creation of dependencies set Americans on the same imperial road on which the Europeans were already well embarked, and began to entangle the United States in European rivalries and alliances through the colonial periphery. With earlier reservations concerning involvement in European affairs partially compromised already, President Theodore Roosevelt took the next cautious step in 1905 when he offered himself as a mediator in a crisis between France and Germany over Morocco and in Russia’s losing war against Japan. This interest in European diplomacy, however roundabout or tentative, had by the turn of the century begun to create a commonality of outlook between Washington and London just as it injected tensions into dealings between Washington and Berlin.11 While Washington consistently disavowed any step that might directly implicate the country in an alliance system, the United States had nevertheless become a factor in the thinking of European foreign offices. They well knew that to ignore or alienate the United States would be at their own peril.

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Fed by a strong economy and strengthened by a long string of successful foreign policy exercises, the American state in the 1880s began to put on muscle as presidents sought to assert and defend extra-continental interests. From that decade can be traced the rise of a professional military and naval force trained for expeditionary duties. At the same time, the executive began to cultivate international affairs expertise (the beginnings of a foreign affairs bureaucracy) and to accumulate foreign policy powers in its own hands (the first steps toward an imperial presidency). In William McKinley the American state found the first strong chief executive bent on turning palpable national power to a variety of international ends. What McKinley began, his immediate successors, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, would continue.12 Rapid economic development, territorial predation on a widening scale, mounting foreign policy pretensions and capacity—all this does much to explain the rapid American ascent from a vulnerable new nation seeking to overcome its colonial dependency to a great power with its own colonies and dependencies and the means to control and defend them. But it does not tell the full story. Notably, it does not tell us why the American international position ultimately took the particular form it did: dominance on the continent and growing influence overseas. It is possible to imagine other, quite different outcomes. Americans could, at critical points, have chosen other national paths that would have carried them toward quite different destinations in foreign affairs. Most fundamentally, Americans might have resisted the lure of industry and international commerce, counted the social costs of technological innovation, and obstructed the flow of an immigrant work force, thus holding down the overall rate of economic growth. A less rich United States might have proven a much less formidable presence in the world. However, Americans rejected this course, a decision that needs to be added to our explanation of the international ascent. Rather than maintaining a domestic environment friendly to simple republican civic values and stable communities, Americans placed their faith in the unconstrained marketplacethe most efficient arbiter for a society that they regarded as a collection of self-interested individual buyers and sellers whose economic behavior was to be only lightly fettered by social, political, or moral constraints. 13 Individualism unleashed personal ambition and energy, encouraged the use of new technologies, helped sustain a dynamic (if crisisprone) economic system, and fueled the relentless process of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration-driven population growth that was the concomitant of territorial expansion. There were other, more discrete choices to be made in the realm of foreign policy. The decisions made in the first decades may have been the most consequential. The Federalist administration of George Washington might have resisted rather than accommodated British hegemony on the high seas, or the Republicans who followed might have been less prickly in their response to

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continuing British maritime pressure. Either way, policymakers would have paid a price. Federalist defiance would have divided the country politically, damaged trade, and enfeebled the new state, which was dependent on the revenue from trade. On the other hand, quiescent Republican leaders would have found themselves vulnerable to charges of passivity and dependence and watched their party lapse into a deadly malaise. Subsequent policymakers also discarded alternatives that might have pointed the United States in quite a different direction. Washington might have adopted a policy of greater accommodation toward native Americans and respected the constraints embodied in treaties negotiated with them. A humane live-and-let-live approach might, in turn, have imposed a measure of restraint on national expansion toward the Pacific. Americans might have resisted presidential incitement to war against Mexico in 1845–6. In the peace that followed they might have either settled for minor territorial adjustments in Texas that were the ostensible cause of the conflict, or alternatively seized all of Mexico. Later still, some means of resolving the quarrel with Spain short of war might have been found in 1898, the quarrel avoided altogether at its inception in 1896, or the peace treaty in 1899 framed in non-territorial terms. Certainly some voices were heard in support of each of these alternative policies at points between the 1790s and the 1890s. But they did not prevail. Why? The answer can be found in one critical element missing in the discussion to this point: the ideas that guided American policymakers as they contemplated their choices and made the decisions that carried the United States from success to success and ultimately to eminence as a global power. Those ideas constituted a powerful and enduring tradition within which US policy was made, and which linked the early era to the later. FORMAL POLICY DOCTRINES In thinking about the role of ideas in relation to policy, it is helpful to draw a distinction between formal policy doctrines and informal policy ideology. The formal doctrines arose as responses to particular policy problems in one of the three regions of the world that commanded the attention of Washington and the foreign policy public: Latin America, East Asia, and Europe. Often no more than a pious hope or vague preference when first broached, these doctrines gained authority as generally accepted axioms through repeated invocation by policymakers. The two doctrines that proved to be the most influential, the Monroe doctrine and the open door, provided guidance for US policy in Latin America and East Asia—the two regions that offered the young American republic the broadest field for asserting national will and developing markets. By contrast, American influence was sharply circumscribed on the European stage, and thus the United States had to proceed more cautiously there. Europe could not be ignored altogether, however, as it remained a

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center of global economic and military power. The complex American relationship with that region spelled an uneven career for the doctrines devoted to trans-Atlantic dealings. The longest-lived of the doctrines, indeed one still central to US policy, bears the name of President James Monroe. 14 In 1823 European powers seemed ready to intervene in Latin America to restore Spanish colonial dominion. Monroe responded by asserting that Europe and the Americas had distinct interests pointing those two worlds toward different destinies. Although his warning against European interference in the New World had little teeth at the time, it did establish a basis for a US claim as the leader and protector of this hemisphere. By degrees the Monroe doctrine acquired teeth. Soon after the end of the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward linked Monroe’s doctrine to a successful drive to eliminate a French presence in Mexico. The doctrine received strong affirmation again in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney, speaking for the Harrison administration, forced Britain to withdraw from a Latin American territorial dispute and, in effect, to accept the United States as the hemispheric hegemon. And the doctrine was expanded in 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt used it in arrogating to the United States the role of policeman in the hemisphere, as much concerned with the good behavior of Latin Americans as with the intrusion of outsiders. In East Asia, second only to Latin America as an overseas stage for national expansion, the open door emerged as the guiding doctrine. It had its formal birth in 1899 when William McKinley’s Secretary of State, John Hay, used it to claim equal treatment for American commerce in China, which was vying for a place in a market of supposedly enormous potential but seemingly threatened by European imperial ambitions. A year later, in the midst of a crisis in north China, Hay restated the open door in broader terms: to the previous concern with access to China’s market, he now added a commitment to safeguard Chinese independence. The open door thus linked equal trade opportunity to long-term American political and cultural influences. It also elevated China, the weak Asian giant whose future development seemed to hold the key to longterm American influence throughout the region, to a place of importance in US policy.15 The ideas behind the open door were, however, older than Hay and broader in application than China. Concern with access to markets and competition on equal terms had, for example, been expressed by Americans in the 1850s when dealing with Japan, and later in Korea. In the twentieth century the open door would be applied virtually on a global basis.16 The all-purpose nature of the open door—its mix of economic, political, and cultural concerns—made it applicable to a wide variety of circumstances but at the same time rendered it increasingly diffuse and contributed to its ultimate decline as a formal doctrine. It has nonetheless remained influential as a background idea, where it became interwoven with the informal ideology. When dealing with Europe, Americans adopted a more cautious approach.

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Unlike the countries of Latin America and East Asia, the European powers were strong enough to define the terms of their trade with the United States both in the metropole and in their colonies. Declarations of an open door would have had no effect. Similarly, European military strength, established political patterns, and cultural self-confidence combined to discourage the projection of an American nationalist dream to that region—indeed they posed a potential threat to American security and national identity. The two policy doctrines that were developed in dealing with Europe were consequently governed by conflicting impulses: to hold the Old World at a safe political and military distance while simultaneously protecting access to the continent that provided the most important market for American goods and the indispensable source of capital for American economic development. The doctrine of the freedom of the seas reflected the importance of Europe in American economic life. It was intended to assure unimpeded access to European markets in time of conflict among European powers. As a neutral, the United States claimed the right—subject to minimal restrictions and responsibilities—to carry goods on the high seas safe from harassment, seizure, or interference by the belligerents. In this way business would preserve its regular trade and perhaps even add markets that were normally closed to the United States in time of peace. The American claim to freedom of the seas, couched in terms of international law, reflected early US naval weakness and hence an inability to defend commerce in any way but through abstract appeals. Not surprisingly, Britain, with its well endowed naval force, respected neutral claims only when it was convenient. Equally unsurprising, when American naval strength grew to the point that it could not only effectively protect US maritime interests but advantageously command the trade of others, the doctrine of freedom of the seas was soon eclipsed. Suspended during the Civil War when the Union sought to break the Confederacy’s economic lifeline to Europe, the doctrine thereafter enjoyed a revival but also faced a growing challenge from big-navy advocates who argued that might—not law—was the best and ultimate defense of American commerce. The outbreak of the First World War rallied the Wilson administration to the cause of free trade and neutral rights (at least as the president understood them), but thereafter freedom of the seas faded rapidly as the US navy moved toward mastery of the world’s oceans.17 The doctrine of isolationism was generated by fear of European power. While freedom of the seas sought to keep the Atlantic an open highway for American commerce, isolationism tried to make that ocean a great divide separating the Old World from the New. The United States was a peaceful republic with nothing to gain by entanglement with Europe’s rapacious, warprone, and oppressive monarchies. Thus, isolationism was a conceptual twin to the Monroe doctrine, building from the idea of two spheres. Just as policymakers committed themselves to resisting European interference on their own side of the Atlantic, so too they should resist any temptation to get caught up in Europe’s alliances and wars.

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This notion of isolation developed out of the American colonial experience with Anglo-French imperial rivalry between 1688 and 1763. During this period Americans had suffered from European quarrels, been deprived of a voice in the critical questions of war and peace, and were often forgotten when the spoils were divided. Once independent, Americans searched for a policy that would remove them as far as possible from the European maelstrom generated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic conquests. In 1796, on the eve of his retirement from the presidency, George Washington urged on his countrymen the wisdom of maintaining a “detached and distant position” from European quarrels. His successors in the White House consistently echoed his sentiments throughout the nineteenth century.18 Growing American strength and the temptation to meddle in European quarrels killed off isolation as a doctrine in much the same way that these developments undermined freedom of the seas. But the ideas behind the doctrine proved tenacious through the first half of the twentieth century, repeatedly inspiring opposition to policymakers imprudent enough to want to throw the weight of American might and ideals into European struggles. The anti-interventionists lost, and the victors took their revenge by constructing a caricature of their former foe. Advocates of direct participation in World War II and then cold warriors preoccupied with the defense of Western Europe blamed the earlier era of isolation for what they saw as their countrymen’s deplorable passivity, woeful ignorance, and lamentable inexperience in world affairs. According to this critical, latter-day view, isolation carried a curse for twentiethcentury Americans trying to adjust to the nation’s transformed position in the world—a lack of preparation, even an aversion, to playing the role of a world power. But isolation as a doctrine deserves to be understood historically. To do so requires moving beyond the pejorative, anachronistic, and distorting use of that term that had developed, by the middle of the twentieth century, out of heated public debates over European policy and that even today dominates both popular and elite discussions of policy issues. Isolationism itself was, to be sure, a doctrine of denial, but it was applied to only one region—Europe— and only to forms of political and military entanglement deemed dangerous or irrelevant to American interests. Americans could, in this sense, be isolationist and yet, at the same time, trade avidly with the Old World, borrow large amounts of its capital, travel to look with awe on its monuments, read its literature and philosophy, accept its poor, and mix socially with its prominent families. Isolation was, moreover, not the doctrine of early US policy but rather one of several, and the caution and prudence that characterized it should not obscure the more assertive and aggressive aspects of the other doctrines. The application of those doctrines, taken together, endowed American policy-makers with a rich and varied experience in international affairs. Hardly inactive, they could boast an overall record of stunning success. Finally, isolationism was not (as its critics have charged) shallow and

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thoughtless. “Isolationists” raised serious questions about the wisdom of involvement in European rivalries. Such involvement, they contended, made the United States hostage to developments beyond its control while imposing real domestic costs: increased national debt, lives lost and disrupted, and the concentration of power in what would come to be called the “national security state.” INFORMAL POLICY IDEOLOGY Underpinning these four major policy doctrines, and providing support for them, was an informal ideology that constituted the other intellectual tradition of early US foreign policy. Studies on US policy have often depicted ideology as a rigid and misleading view of the world or, alternatively, as a narrow set of marketplace calculations that has led Washington to pursue an open-door world for American goods and capital. But ideology can be understood in a third way: as a coherent, mutually reenforcing body of ideas that gives structure and meaning to the way policymakers and the broader public concerned with international affairs see the world and the American place in it. This informal system of ideas is grounded in cultural values and practices that subtly shape foreign policy. It is intellectual baggage that policymakers carry into office. Its contents reflect their personal, class, regional, and ethnic backgrounds as well as their socialization into the dominant myths of American nationalism. As such, ideology is the fundamental starting point for explaining how and why policymakers make their critical decisions. It is also just the beginning, and thus room needs to be left for a variety of influences from the pressures imposed by the international system to the personality quirks of particular leaders.19 In practical terms this informal ideology takes us another step closer to an explanation of why American leaders made certain choices in the conduct of foreign relations, rejected others, and in the process created an expansionist, outwardly oriented country. Ideology gave American leaders the confidence and shared purpose to get through the difficult first decades, while the harvest of successes after 1815 did much to validate and deepen the beliefs that were at the core of their thought. Ideology also infused early policy doctrines with meaning and then provided continuity when policymakers shucked off the old doctrines and replaced them with new ones such as collective security, containment, and development theory. Finally, this approach to ideology helps us to see that early US foreign policy was not exceptional but “normal” in the sense of being comparable to that of other major powers: Britain, Germany, and Japan have also sought—at one time or another—to define their nationalism in terms of an activist foreign policy.20 Foremost of the elements in this informal ideology was a commitment to the pursuit of national greatness, cast in terms of the promotion of liberty abroad. Americans conceived of themselves as a people engaged in a political experiment of historical and global significance. As the patriot and pamphleteer

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Thomas Paine declared at the outset of the struggle for independence, Americans had it in their power “to begin the world over again.” However, this sense of self-importance, so central to American nationalism, contained an ambiguity that was brought sharply into focus in the 1790s at the very outset of US foreign policy in a heated and far-ranging exchange between the ruling Federalists and the emergent opposition party, the Republicans.21 Echoes of that first encounter sounded throughout the next two centuries and can still be heard today. Alexander Hamilton, the architect of Federalist foreign policy, was the first to articulate the activist vision of national greatness with its emphasis on the promotion of American power in the world and the exercise of that power in the interest of freedom. Hamilton conceived of the United States as a dynamic republic, committed above all to the vigorous promotion of liberty abroad as a good in its own right, but also as a stimulant to a vigorous liberty at home. This vision committed Hamiltonians to the building of a strong federal government and to the exercise of American power overseas—the scope and scale of which would broaden as national resources grew. Thomas Jefferson, the foremost Republican, offered during his time as Washington’s Secretary of State and then in the political opposition a more cautious, alternative vision. Jefferson was critical of Hamiltonian foreign policy because it ignored, even endangered, the primary obligation of a good society: to see to the welfare of its own people and to protect and perfect a fragile experiment in democracy. He regarded imperial aspirations and commitments as poisonous to republican ideals, and he rejected a forceful policy of global transformation as a destructive illusion. The appropriate American role in the world, Jefferson and fellow Republicans argued, was as a model for—not a guarantor of—others seeking freedom. The debate continued as the United States became a continental power. In the 1840s, proponents of the nation’s “manifest destiny” such as President James K.Polk contended that the addition of new territories was consistent with the US role as a special agent of freedom and progress and as a special country with boundless possibilities. Passivity would, expansionists argued, doom the American experiment to stagnation and failure, while the acquisition of new lands would revitalize the American spirit and extend the sphere of liberty. Expansionist schemes roused critics who decried above all the danger that a war of conquest would pose to liberty and to republican virtue; they warned that the United States could not champion liberty and at the same time pursue empire.22 The debate was rejoined in the 1890s as the United States established its hemispheric dominance and entered the competition for overseas empire. Echoing the liturgy of earlier foreign-policy activists, McKinley claimed for the United States a right and duty to establish colonies, help “oppressed peoples,” and generally project its power and influence into the world. Americans would benefit, and so would all humanity. On the other side, critics with a pristine and self-limiting vision of the American future made the familiar claims for the

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incompatibility of liberty with the exercise of dominion over others. They predicted that the net effect of foreign adventures would soon be seen at home in the form of a burgeoning state apparatus that would dispense patronage and control a large military establishment. Factions would contend for this concentrated power, inexorably corrupt republican virtue, and ultimately overthrow liberty.23 By the turn of the century the Hamiltonian conception of national greatness was predominant, having triumphed in each of the earlier confrontations with its Jeffersonian alternatives. Even so, the voice of the doubters could be heard as the Wilson administration moved toward entry into World War I and, later, proposed American participation in a League of Nations; later still, on the eve of American entry into World War II, they raised familiar doubts about the wisdom of entanglement in European quarrels. On each occasion the doubters sought to counter the appeal of an assertive foreign policy by stressing the costs to republican ideals and to the welfare of the common man. In their view the national interest might be better served by focusing on domestic welfare rather than channeling American energy and treasure abroad in the delusion that the United States could control events in a dangerous world. While the Cold War silenced the debate, the classic questions concerning the purpose of foreign policy and the costs attached to it have again moved to center stage in the last decade: critics from both the Left and the Right, alarmed by the portents of national decline, have attacked the course of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The second element making up the informal ideology of early US foreign policy was a conception of racial hierarchy that served as a check to expansionism, but also as a goad and a justification. American views on race, derived initially from Europe, gained additional form and force through the subjugation of native Americans, the enslavement and repression of AfricanAmericans, and the reaction to millions of immigrants arriving from China and Japan as well as Europe. The essence of these views, which came to exercise a grip on the imagination of policymakers and the influential public (largely white Americans of old stock), was the conviction that skin color was closely related to innate worth, whether measured in terms of individual virtue or the capacity of a people. Whites in general and Protestants of English descent in particular were at the top, blacks at the bottom, and other peoples arrayed at intermediate and sometimes changing points between the poles. This hierarchical notion easily applied to the world outside as well. It required no more than an understanding of easily grasped polarities and superficial characteristics. Races were different and unequal. Some were more civilized and progressive, others were more barbaric and backward. In the structure of American race thinking, Anglo-Saxonism—the belief that Americans and the British were one people united by uncommon qualities and common interests—came to occupy a central position. By the first half of the nineteenth century some influential Americans had begun to take pride in proclaiming their place in a trans-Atlantic community of English-speaking

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people. By the end of the century the Anglo-Saxon spell had further strengthened its hold. The predominant racial characteristics of both peoples, as they were now defined, included industry, intelligence, a keen sense of moral purpose, and a talent for government.24 Seen in global terms, the Anglo-Saxons were dominant. The Germans came next: they had the same qualities as their racial cousins save one—they had lost their love of liberty. This single serious defect set Germans just beyond the Anglo-Saxon pale, making them a formidable people and a threatening global competitor that would have to be watched closely; by the turn of the century, Americans increasingly pictured them as latter-day Huns, prone to the aggressive, even brutal behavior characteristic of a militaristic and autocratic system. The Slavs, half European and half Asiatic, were also seen as formidable racial competitors on the international stage. Highly regimented and of rugged peasant stock, they had displayed great endurance, patience, and strength (but not intelligence and a knack for innovation) as they had slowly but irresistibly extended their control over much of the Eurasian land mass. Lower down in the hierarchy were the Latin peoples of Europe (defined to include the French as well as Italians and Spaniards) and of the Americas. They lacked vigor; they were sentimental, undisciplined, priest-ridden, and superstitious; consequently, they were of small account in international affairs. Latin Americans figured prominently as somewhat child-like or brutish inferiors in need of the benevolent hand of the more mature. The peoples of East Asia, sometimes designated “the Mongolian race” but more popularly referred to as “orientals,” also stood somewhere near the middle of the racial ladder. They were construed as a disturbing, even dangerous, bundle of contradictions. Inscrutable and somnolent, they were also a people of promise, on the verge of shaking off a stagnant cultural tradition and improving their position in the hierarchy of race. They were subhuman, yet cunning; unfeeling, yet boiling inwardly with rage; cowardly and decadent, yet capable of great conquests. Predictably, on the lowest rung of the ladder were the peoples of Africa, a continent that, above all others, invited white dominion. Racial notions had helped Americans to rationalize the drive to expel Spain from North America and then to push south the border of Mexico, an enemy denounced as “ignorant, prejudiced, and perfectly faithless.”25 Those notions again made themselves felt in the 1890s. They supported the ripening claim of the United States to the role of natural leader and policeman of an American system of states, inspired cries to rescue a ravaged Cuba from Spanish atrocities, and bolstered demands for the annexation of the Philippines. But at the same time those same notions gave rise to opposition to overseas colonies, especially in the Philippines. Ruling in tropical climates and mixing with lesser peoples would undermine the racial vitality of the Anglo-Saxon stock. Accepted by the turn of the century as an important ingredient in a demonstrably successful foreign policy no less than in the established

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domestic order, race thinking would pass to subsequent generations as a wellnigh irresistible legacy. American policymakers would continue to look to race as an essential category for understanding other countries and peoples and as a fundamental basis for judging them. While the civil rights movement in the United States would, by degrees, put a taboo on overtly racist expressions, policymakers continued to think of other peoples in terms of the characteristics previously associated with the hierarchy of race and to assign other nations a rough ranking that bore a striking resemblance to earlier estimates. The final element rounding out the informal American foreign policy ideology was an ambivalent attitude toward revolutionary change. That attitude was strongly influenced by memories of the American revolution, fixed in nationalist lore as a model of moderation and wisdom. Against that model all struggles for freedom were to be judged, whether directed against foreign masters or home-grown tyrants. Revolution was a solemn affair, to be conducted with a minimum of disorder, led by respectable citizens, harnessed to moderate political goals, and happily concluded only after a balanced constitution—essential to safeguarding human and property rights—was securely in place. Foreigners who embarked on revolution almost never measured up. Their revolutions had a deplorable tendency to self-destruct. Revolutionary leaders stumbled because of their personal failings: despotic habits, selfish ambitions, and simple ineptitude or weakness of character. The inability of foreign peoples to meet the test of revolution and liberty was explained most often in the familiar terms of the hierarchy of race. Where Anglo-Saxons succeeded, all others struggled. The lower down the hierarchy, the more rapid and disastrous would be the revolutionary failure. Once unleashed in one land, the infectious spirit of revolution could spread, for better or worse, to other lands with important consequences for the American political experiment itself. The achievement of ordered liberty by others would confirm for Americans their leading role in a secure world of free peoples. Revolutions gone astray, on the other hand, would leave Americans feeling repudiated, isolated, and anxious. All fresh revolutionary outbreaks, even distant ones, bore careful watching. This anxiety that came to mark early US foreign policy was confirmed through confrontation with three waves of revolutionary change. The first wave of revolution struck in France and Latin America between the 1790s and the 1810s. In 1789, just as Americans were bringing their own seminal struggle for liberty to a successful constitutional conclusion, an upheaval in France held out the promise that Europe would soon recast itself along American political lines. But as the revolution in France took a more radical and violent turn after 1793, increasing numbers of Americans set it beyond the bounds of legitimacy—and roundly condemned its sympathizers in the United States. If Americans needed another bitter lesson in the dangers of the revolutionary contagion, then they soon got it in Santo Domingo, where in

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1791 an underclass of black slaves and freedmen had taken the doctrines of the French Revolution seriously and massacred their French masters to gain freedom. Might the southern United States be next? Latin America’s struggle for freedom from Spanish control, following the crest of revolutionary activity in France and Santo Domingo, served to confirm and extend the darker view. If those outbreaks of the 1790s had conclusively established the danger of social revolution, the revolts against Spain suggested the limits of even moderate anti-colonial struggles. Peoples long oppressed by foreign rule were bound to want liberty, but the conditions that had held them down, including the burden of race, might also leave them incapable of either winning or maintaining it. The second wave of revolutions was confined to Europe at mid-century, sweeping across its entire face. From the heights of hope in 1848 that a community of youthful republics were about to replace the tottering old monarchies, American observers sank by 1871 into a slough of despair as mobs took over the streets of Paris. Before its violent suppression in late May, the Paris Commune had yielded a full catalogue of radical transgressions that ranged from systematic pillage of private property to unreasoning violence. The third wave of revolutions witnessed by Americans began to build in the 1890s, and by the 1910s girdled the globe. In both the Philippines and Cuba, revolutions against Spanish colonial authority were cut short by American military intervention. Washington decreed that tutelage was the correct course for “natives” not yet ready for liberty and full independence. Thereafter, China, Mexico, and then Russia would become the scenes of revolutionary dramas that commanded close American attention. In all three countries the old order crashed with such speed and resounding finality that Americans were tempted to entertain those old sweet dreams of freedom’s advance. But not for long. As each of these revolutions “went astray,” old American prejudices again rose to the surface. The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia gave rise to the greatest alarm. Policymakers and commentators found abhorrent a regime that denied political, religious, and property rights, advocated “free love” and atheism, and promoted class warfare not only at home but also abroad. American nativist and other conservative elements joined in a campaign to insulate their own country from a fever that was spreading into the heart of Europe. By the early twentieth century a deep ambivalence about revolutionary change had become an important element in the thinking of policymakers, and it would shape their response to a fourth revolutionary wave that burst upon them in the middle of the twentieth century. Then as earlier, the terror and injustice spawned by revolutions raised the call for armed vigilance in Washington. Those same explosions of political heterodoxy abroad also served to strengthen the case for an American right to judge and instruct others less politically adept and to reenforce the assumptions about the greatness of a nation that could for so long maintain order within its own borders even as disorder raged in other lands.

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TRADITIONS AND THE FUTURE OF US POLICY The traditions that shaped early US foreign policy are multiple. Most obviously, they consisted of an impressive record of success in gaining control of a continent and then projecting power from that continental base overseas—into Latin America, across the Pacific into East Asia, and even tentatively into Europe. Americans entered the twentieth century acutely aware of and buoyed up by that record. Those early traditions also consisted of formal doctrines, concepts that emerged from the actual formulation and application of policy to one or another of the three regions that stood foremost in the concerns of Washington. Some of those doctrines, such as Monroe’s, would remain potent while others, such as isolation, would lose their grip on policy. Informal ideology was the most far-reaching and fundamental of the foreign policy traditions. It served as an indispensable compass for policy-makers as they moved from triumph to triumph, while the accumulating record of success in turn validated and made stronger the claims of that ideology. At the same time ideology provided the intellectual underpinning for the early policy doctrines, sustaining those that survived and outlasting those that faltered. The foreign policy ideology that guided the United States on its road to becoming a great power by the early twentieth century and a superpower by the end of World War II is now woven deeply into the fabric of the national culture and policy discourse. It is easily heard in celebrations of victory in the Cold War and in proclamations of a “New World Order.” The ideology that took form during the rise of the United States to its standing as a major player on the world stage is also a potentially serious obstacle to understanding and managing the affairs of a country now somewhat beyond the apogee of its might. Efforts to slow or reverse the process of decline will, at important points, collide with an informal ideology that endows Americans with a pervasive, unexamined conviction of national greatness, an impulse to judge the worth of others by the standards of America’s own institutions and values, and a commitment to particular lines of political and economic development. The challenges to traditional American ideological claims issue from four directions. First, the world is becoming increasingly fragmented into regions that are dominated by one or more centers of economic and military strength that are suspicious (if not intolerant) of meddling from outside. It is a world that will not prove hospitable to American attempts to impose its own solutions on regional problems. Yet the failure of policies that were built on a respect for spheres of influence, ranging from the initiatives of Theodore Roosevelt to those of Richard Nixon, does not augur well for any renewed effort toward limiting the American global reach. Even though American power may be less freely and effectively exercised today than in the recent past, any call to retreat from the accustomed “great role” in the world is likely to give rise to a profound and politically explosive sense of unease. A second challenge can be found in the international economy. The system

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that the United States put in place and dominated in the wake of World War II has now reached into virtually every corner of the globe, and in the process has undermined even the old bulwarks of socialism. But the United States, itself palpably faltering, can no longer convincingly claim to stand as a model for or master of that economy. As the world’s largest debtor with low rates of saving, slow productivity gains, and slow overall growth, the United States does not cut an impressive figure. Here too the United States faces unaccustomed limits and the need to address domestic problems that discredit the American model and undermine American capacity for leadership. A Jeffersonian program of economic and social revival will require American leaders to look inward and restrict the funds and attention that were previously devoted to international affairs. But is it possible for Americans to put on hold their outward-looking nationalism while they put their house in order? Third, the United States faces a challenge to its old identity in a world still marked by profound differences in cultural values and aspirations. Resurgent nationalism in parts of Eastern Europe and much of the former Soviet Union, together with the revitalization of Islamic values, ought to remind us that the age of global diversity has not passed. That diversity is likely to be strengthened by the emergence of three global economic blocs, each with a distinct cultural orientation. The German-dominated pan-European market and the Japanese-dominated East Asian co-prosperity sphere are both likely to sustain ways of life quite different from that within the US-dominated North American bloc. As this culturally plural world increasingly intrudes into the lives of Americans through trade, immigration, and new technologies of communication, an understanding of other cultures will be essential to function effectively and live comfortably. 26 The maintenance of condescending assumptions about cultural superiority and simple stereotypes will not make the encounter with this complex and differentiated world either profitable, smooth, or enriching. Finally, the most subtle but perhaps the most profound challenge to Americans is to respond humanely to the political, social, and economic aspirations that have, in other lands, given rise to revolutionary dreams and movements in this century. Hopes for a better life continue to animate peoples in the grip of military violence, political injustice, and dire poverty. But Americans have difficulty responding empathetically and effectively because they remain in the grip of an ideology that insists on the universality of the American way and at the same time begrudge tax dollars devoted to foreign assistance. Can the United States make a significant commitment to the welfare of foreigners not in order to confirm national greatness but in order to fulfill fundamental obligations of human solidarity? One option for Americans is to leave the old ideology unexamined and uncontested. Perhaps fate will treat the United States kindly and little harm will come from clinging to familiar nationalist pretensions and policies. But it is more likely that such a course will steadily intensify the domestic malaise and diminish the ability to act internationally. One alternative—to seek to live apart

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from ideology—is to misunderstand the problem. Without ideology any people are left in limbo, wondering what values might give meaning and direction to their foreign policy. The remaining alternative is to reflect on, debate, and perhaps reorient key elements of US foreign policy ideology in a way that helps meet these international challenges. It is an effort that will not come easily or quickly, and it may well take pain, even trauma, before Americans are prepared to set about the task with the requisite seriousness. To that process of transformation historical perspective will be essential, offering above all else a reminder that defining the United States as a nation and its role in the world is not the work of a day but merely the extension of an enterprise as old as the sense of nationhood itself. Americans of the 1990s would do well to recognize that they have inherited strong foreign policy traditions even if they do not fully recognize them, and that any effort to alter the direction of their policy must confront the constraints imposed by those traditions. NOTES 1 On these different views of the early decades, see Jerald A.Combs, American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations, Berkeley, Calif., 1983; Kinley J.Brauer, “The Great American Desert Revisited: Recent Literature and Prospects for the Study of American Foreign Relations, 1815–61,” Diplomatic History, vol. 13, 1989, pp. 395–417; and Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900,2nd rev. ed., Arlington Heights, III., 1986, chap. 1. Anyone interested in this or any other era can turn for help to Richard D.Burns (ed.), Guide to American Foreign Relations Since 1700, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1983, a critical bibliography; to the journal Diplomatic History, which regularly carries historiographical surveys; and to Alexander DeConde (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 3 vols, New York, 1978. 2 For the most influential case for American decline, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York, 1987. Of all the critical responses to the decline thesis, none was more triumphal and more widely discussed than Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16, summer 1989, pp. 3–18. Richard Rosecrance, “Must America Decline?,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 14, 1990, pp. 67–85, surveys the debate. 3 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, pp. 94, 200. 4 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, p. 243. 5 This theme is central in Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 3rd ed., New York, 1955. Reginald Horsman, The Diplomacy of the New Republic, Arlington Heights, III., 1985, offers a recent survey of these early, difficult years. 6 Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908, Berkeley, Calif., 1967; Reginald Stuart, United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775–1871, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988; and David Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865, New York, 1974. 7 On territorial expansion see Robert W.Tucker and David C.Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson, New York, 1990; Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, New York, 1976; Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion, New York, 1955; Thomas

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R.Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985; and Charles S. Campbell Jr, The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865–1900, New York, 1976. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empire, and Republics in the Great Lake Region, 1650–1815, New York, 1991; Gregory E.Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815, Baltimore, Md, 1991; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975; Dorothy V.Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America, Chicago, 1982; Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812, East Lansing, Mich., 1967; and Robert K.Berkhofer Jr, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, New York, 1978. Henry F.Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America, Knoxville, Tenn., 1983; and John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 49, 1992, pp. 298–320. Robert E.May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861, Baton Rouge, La, 1973; Louis A.Pérez Jr, Cuba between Empires, 1878–1902, Pittsburgh, Pa, 1983; and Thomas D.Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860– 1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System, Durham, N.C., 1991. Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895– 1914, New York, 1968; and Holger H.Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889–1941, Boston, 1976, Part I. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New; Lewis L.Gould, The SpanishAmerican War and President McKinley, Lawrence, Kan., 1982; John L.Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895– 1898, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992; and Robert C.Hilderbrand, Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897–1921, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981: Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790– 1820, Baltimore, Md, 1987. John J.Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy toward Latin America, Baltimore, Md, 1990; and Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, Boston, 1941. Thomas J.McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901, Chicago, 1967; and Michael H.Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, New York, 1983, offer divergent perspectives. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, first edition, Cleveland, Ohio, 1959; Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of a Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society, New York, 1969; and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963, all make a strong claim for the importance of a global open door. For some thoughtful rejoinders, see William Becker, “American Manufacturers and Foreign Markets, 1870–1900,” Business History Review, vol. 47, 1973, pp. 466–81; and William H.Becker and Samuel F.Wells Jr (eds), Economics and World Power: An Assessment of American Diplomacy Since 1789, New York, 1984. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795– 1805, Philadelphia, Pa, 1955; Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812, Berkeley, Calif., 1961; and John W.Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915, Ithaca, N.Y., 1981.

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Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy, Princeton, N.J., 1961. For additional discussion see Michael H.Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven, Conn., 1987, chap. 1; Hunt, “Ideology,” and Emily Rosenberg, “Gender,” both in “A Roundtable: Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History, vol. 77, 1990, pp. 108–24; and Bradford Perkins, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-five Years After,” Reviews in American History, vol. 12, 1984, pp. 1–18. The treatment through the balance of this section draws, directly at points, from Hunt, Ideology, chaps 2–4.1 am grateful to Yale University Press for permission to make use of this material. For a pioneering study, see Albert K.Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism and American History, Baltimore, Md, 1935. Jerald A.Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers, Berkeley, Calif., 1970; Jacob E.Cooke, Alexander Hamilton, New York, 1982; and Drew R.McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980. Hietala, Manifest Design. Robert Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900, New York, 1968; and Stuart C.Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903, New Haven, Conn., 1982. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, Mass., 1981. Quote from Hunt, Ideology, p. 60. Michael Vlahos, “Culture and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, no. 82, spring 1991, pp. 59–78.

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“They don’t come out where you expect”: institutions of American diplomacy and the policy process J.Garry Clifford

The new British ambassador came to Washington in early 1941. A distinguished statesman, former viceroy to India, and foreign secretary for the previous three years, Lord Halifax nonetheless had little first-hand knowledge of the United States and even less “feel” for the vagaries of American politics. Gaffes soon occurred. The ambassador went fox-hunting in Virginia during the Congressional debates over lend-lease; he treated defeated presidential candidate Wendell Willkie as though he were the shadow prime minister; and he wrote long reports to London bemoaning the inefficiency and irrationality in the policy process in Washington. Halifax expressed amazement at the deference President Franklin D.Roosevelt seemed to pay to every ripple of public opinion. He was aghast at the distance and suspicion that separated the White House and Congress along Pennsylvania Avenue. Nor could he make sense of the institutional crosscurrents and personal rivalries among the various executive departments, “who might almost as well be the administration of different countries.” Finally, Halifax used a favorite metaphor: “I suppose it is rather like a disorderly line of beaters out shooting; they do put the rabbits out of the bracken, but they don’t come out where you expect.”1 Lord Halifax was hardly the first foreign visitor to be perplexed by the American foreign policy process. Learning quickly, he became an accomplished wartime ambassador over the next six years, a sharp contrast to one of his predecessors, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, who had become persona non grata for accidentally intruding into the presidential election of 1888. The puzzles that most perplexed Halifax and other observers were the separation of powers and the intricate system of checks and balances, in short the constitutional and organizational limits upon the capacity of the chief executive to provide a bold and straightforward lead in foreign affairs. Notwithstanding the legendary juggling skills of a Franklin Roosevelt, political procedures in Washington were often byzantine in their complexity. A system of governance designed to protect the polity against King George III’s supposed tyrannies (or those of a homegrown despot) has inevitably impeded innovation and diluted presidential dominance. As the historian Theodore A.Wilson has written, “the institutions, 21

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attributes, and systemic constraints which Americans embraced differ in important respects …from the systems of governance of other nation states. Those differences matter.”2 Diplomatic historians who focus on the pluralistic and centrifugal dynamics of the American policy process tend to emphasize discontinuity, accidental results, and intra-governmental conflict. Given the historiographical concerns of the present volume, scholars who elucidate the institutional interactions of the policy process practice, at least unconsciously, what H.W.Brands has called “fractal history.”3 Intent on explaining the mechanics and timing of particular episodes, illuminating proximate as opposed to deeper causes of policy, and showing why outcomes were not always what was intended, historians who scrutinize the policy process are not trying to answer such grand questions as why the United States has opposed revolutions and why hegemonic powers inevitably decline. More a framework for analysis than a school of interpretation, this approach has a narrower focus. The bureaucratic details of débâcles like Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs invasion are thus better understood than the evolution of containment strategies over four decades.4 In John L.Gaddis’s categorization of historians, those scholars who emphasize the policy process tend to be “splitters” rather than “lumpers”.5 To use Isaiah Berlin’s analogy, it is one of the many truths the fox must understand as he competes with the single-minded hedgehog.6 As such, this interpretive approach is best suited to sharply defined periods (wars and their aftermaths, major transformations in the international system) characterized by dramatic change and political realignments. Such a framework stands in contrast to the so-called “corporatist” and “postrevisionist” schools in which scholars stress collective efforts by individuals and groups to overcome inhibitions against cooperation.7 These scholars suggest that shared interests and common ideologies of generational elites regarding national security or a liberal capitalist world order may transcend internal checks and bureaucratic inertia over time.8 By investigating the tugging and hauling and trade-offs that occur within governmental institutions we learn how the cooperative core values posited by the corporatists and neorealists are actually formed. Both levels of analysis can be used profitably. Looking inside the American foreign policy process is like eating sausage, in that closer examination of the ingredients does not always inspire confidence in the finished product. Scholars who study institutional underpinnings usually reject the assumption that foreign policy is produced by the purposeful acts of a unitary national government. Rather, policies emerge as the outcome of battles between the executive and legislative branches, of compromise and bargaining among various participants within the executive. “Instead of unity,” former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman has written, “there is conflict. Instead of a majestic progression, there are erratic zigs and zags. Instead of clarity and decisiveness, there are tangle and turmoil; instead of order, confusion.”9

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LEGISLATIVE-EXECUTIVE STRUGGLES Regarding the respective roles of Congress and the president in the formulation of American foreign policy, the historian Edwin Corwin once characterized the Constitution as an “invitation to struggle.”10 By giving Congress the power to “declare war” and the authority to raise and support armies and navies, while making the president commander-in-chief with the power to “repel sudden attacks” and to make treaties “by and with the consent of the Senate…provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur,” the Founding Fathers established a system of separate institutions with shared and competing responsibilities.11 The purpose, as Justice Louis Brandeis later noted, was “not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers… to save the people from autocracy.”12 From the beginning, when George Washington refused in 1795 to release to the House of Representatives official correspondence pertaining to Jay’s Treaty, the contest between legislature and executive over foreign policy has ebbed and flowed, at times assuming epic proportions. The political scientist John Rourke has compared the process to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” in which “the struggle between the first two branches of government cyclically swings the power pendulum to and fro while the captive corpus americanus watches from below.”13 Most historians agree that presidents have won these struggles far more often than they have lost. Notwithstanding the tragic confrontation in 1919– 20 between Woodrow Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, wherein the president’s refusal to compromise over reservations to the Versailles Treaty led to its rejection and the subsequent failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, the Senate has refused to ratify only a handful of treaties.14 The precedent was set early, as Pinckney’s treaty with Spain in 1795, the treaty of Ghent following the War of 1812, and the Adams-Onis treaty of 1819 with Spain were unanimously approved by the Senate. Thomas Jefferson established presidential initiative in acquiring territory when he swallowed constitutional scruples and persuaded Congress to approve the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. 15 James Madison and James Monroe learned to bypass the treaty procedure through less binding executive agreements, the most notable being the Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817, which regulated naval armaments on the Great Lakes for the remainder of the century. When President John Tyler could not obtain a twothirds Senate vote for a treaty annexing Texas, he accomplished the desired goal in early 1845 by resorting to a joint congressional resolution, which required only simple majorities in both houses. 16 President William McKinley employed a similar tactic in annexing Hawaii in 1898. On occasion, bitter personal and political disputes between Congressional leaders and presidents resulted in foreign policy setbacks for the White House. After the Civil War a series of expansionist projects proposed by Secretary of State William Seward were rejected, in large part because of Congressional

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opposition to President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies.17 Ulysses S.Grant’s scheme to acquire Santo Domingo foundered because of scandal and what amounted to a personal feud with the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. The Senate killed the treaty, but Grant eventually stripped Sumner of his committee chairmanship.18 John Hay’s arrogant personality so antagonized Senate leaders that they almost delighted in rejecting and amending treaties during his seven-year tenure as secretary of state under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.19 Similarly, by his call for a Democratic Congress in 1918, by his failure to include a prominent Republican or Senator in the American peace delegation, and by his vow that “the Senate must take its medicine,” Woodrow Wilson unnecessarily politicized peace-making after World War I and, in effect, kept the United States from joining the League of Nations.20 The pendulum of Congressional influence reached its apogee in the mid1930s. With war clouds looming over Europe and Asia, and with little initial opposition from the White House, Congress passed a series of neutrality laws designed, it was often said, to keep the United States out of World War I. No longer did Americans claim the right to travel on belligerent ships like the Lusitania. Loans to belligerents were banned, as was the sale of arms and munitions; all other trade was to be on a cash-and-carry basis with American merchant vessels staying out of war zones. President Roosevelt acquiesced because he needed isolationist votes for his New Deal programs. He even encouraged Senator Gerald P.Nye of North Dakota to launch his famous investigation of the munitions industry, which added impetus to neutrality legislation.21 Not until after the Munich conference in the autumn of 1938 did Roosevelt decisively alter course, adopting what Robert A.Divine has called a child’s “game of giant steps” m which the president moved “two steps forward and one back before he took the giant step ahead.”22 All subsequent steps on the road to Pearl Harbor—neutrality revision, selective service, the destroyers for bases deal, economic sanctions against Japan, lend-lease, naval patrols, aid to Russia, convoys, neutrality repeal—FDR justified as the best way for the United States to stay out of the war. Relying on international events and his own manipulative ability, he waited for the right moment to permit Congressional debate on such measures as conscription and lend-lease, both of which eventually passed by substantial margins. 23 More often, he circumvented Congress in obtaining overseas allies and bases, in waging undeclared economic and naval war, and in planning for coalition warfare against the Axis. He discredited isolationist opponents by suggesting that they were unwittingly aiding the Axis. 24 He moved circuitously, obliquely, successfully. Sometimes he went too far, as in his misrepresentation of an unprovoked German U-boat attack on the destroyer Greer in September 1941. “FDR’s deviousness in a good cause,” Senator J.William Fulbright later

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commented, “made it much easier for LBJ to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”25 The subordination of Congress continued during World War II and through much of the Cold War. Roosevelt and Harry S.Truman made certain there would be no repetition of Woodrow Wilson’s mistakes by consulting with key legislators, particularly the senior Republican Senator Arthur H.Vandenberg, and including them as delegates to international conferences. Vandenberg’s notion of “bipartisanship” (a phrase as fuzzy as the mind of its inventor) seemed to promise Congress some influence. The idea, as Vandenberg put it, was that Republicans in Congress would be “co-pilots in the foreign policy take-offs as well as in the crash landings.”26 For Secretary of State Dean Acheson, however, “bipartisanship was a magnificent fraud…which ought to be perpetuated” because “you cannot run this damn country under the Constitution any other way except by fixing the whole organization so it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to work. Now the way to do that is to say politics stops at the seaboard—anyone who denies that postulate is a son of a bitch and a crook and not a true patriot. Now if people will swallow that then you’re off to the races.”27 The White House won most of the races through the 1960s. Even though Senator Fulbright’s hearings helped to focus public opposition to the Vietnam War after 1966, Congress as a body supported the Kennedy/Johnson policy of gradual escalation, backed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with only two dissenting votes, and consistently voted military appropriations until the 1973 peace settlement.28 The end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal brought a revival of Congressional prerogatives. 29 Reacting to a weakened executive and reasserting its own collective ego, Congress voted, over President Richard M. Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution of 1973, under which a president could commit American troops abroad for no more than sixty days, and after that period he or she must obtain Congressional approval. Congress also cut foreign aid to Turkey, Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Angola. The JacksonVanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act blocked most-favored-nation status for the Soviet Union until Moscow relaxed its restrictions on Jewish emigration. In 1975 Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities uncovered shocking evidence of abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including assassination plots against foreign leaders. The Church Committee hearings spurred a series of reforms that gave Congress a statutory role in overseeing intelligence and covert activities.30 Other reforms during the 1970s abolished the seniority system, limited the powers of House and Senate leaders, provided much larger staffs for individual members by adding more than a hundred subcommittees, and thus decentralized Congress. This assertiveness continued into the Jimmy Carter administration, as freshman Senator Dennis DeConcini nearly derailed the Panama Canal Treaty by attaching a crippling reservation and as Senate opposition to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) caused the White House to withdraw it in

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1979. Pundits spoke of an “imperial Congress,” and the British ambassador asked: “Senator, do you think it’s time for all of us to establish our embassies up on the Hill instead of going indirectly through the State Department?”31 Congressional ascendancy proved short-lived. The Iran Hostage Crisis, renewed tensions with Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in a decade of executive dominance. Military intervention against Grenada in 1983, air strikes against Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi in 1986, and Operation Just Cause to topple Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1989 went forward with minimal Congressional consultation and even less dissent. Oversight gave way to what Thomas Paterson has called “afterview,” as hawkish intelligence committee members openly approved, usually after the fact, covert operations which in earlier periods would probably have remained secret: aid to Nicaraguan Contras, Cambodian rebels, and Afghan insurgents.32 When Congress did prohibit aid to the Contras in 1984 and officials of the Reagan administration circumvented the ban by illegal means, including the solicitation of funds from other countries and residual money from secret arms sales to Iran, the subsequent investigations into the Iran-Contra Affair stopped short of challenging a popular president and focused instead on subordinates who were characterized as “loose cannons” and “rogue elephants.”33 As Theodore Draper’s penetrating study of Iran-Contra makes clear, “Congress was an easy, almost willing, victim of the administration’s machinations.” 34 The press, not Congress, discovered what Lt-Col. Oliver North and his associates were doing in Iran and Nicaragua in the president’s name; yet the joint committee’s final report virtuously upheld Congress’s checking and balancing role in foreign policy without mentioning that it had failed to fulfill that responsibility.35 Perhaps the nadir of Congressional influence came with the Gulf War. When President George Bush unilaterally reacted to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 by rushing US troops to Saudi Arabia and pledging that the aggression “will not stand,” and then in November doubled the number of forces to assure an “adequate offensive military option,” he did so without approval or consultation with Congress. When United Nations Resolution 678 authorized member states to use force against Iraq if it did not evacuate Kuwait by 15 January 1991, the president went so far as to argue that he did not need Congressional approval to order American forces into combat against Saddam Hussein. The White House’s eventual request for Congressional authorization to use force, which came after a short debate and close vote (250–183 in the House and 52–47 in the Senate) on 12 January, seemed to render the issue moot, but the victorious outcome of Operation Desert Storm caused an exultant Bush to proclaim that “I had the inherent power to commit our forces to battle after the UN resolution.” According to Michael Glennon, a legal scholar, Bush’s behavior “pushed the Constitution’s system of separation of powers steadily backwards toward the monopolistic system of King George III.”36

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Defenders of Congress point out that there have always been enough tools in the legislative box to protect its constitutional prerogatives. Under favorable political circumstances, legislators can overcome parochial and partisan divisions by denying appropriations, voting against appointments, holding hearings, rejecting treaties or, in extreme circumstances, commencing impeachment proceedings. A powerful legislator can frighten the White House at any time, as perhaps most vividly illustrated by the chairman of the foreign aid subcommittee of the House, who once told a State Department official: “Son, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States of America.”37 Even a strong president who is—as Woodrow Wilson was—committed to a particular foreign policy may challenge Congressional opponents and lose. When President Kennedy once complained to Nikita Khrushchev that dealing with Congress was a “time-consuming process,” the Soviet leader shot back: “Well, why don’t you shift to our system?”38 More often, Congress is seen as part of the public opinion-building process, partly echoing and partly shaping that opinion. Occupants of the Oval Office usually try to avoid the kind of acrimony that detracts from the president’s image as a national leader. Even in extending diplomatic recognition to foreign governments, an area of exclusive executive prerogative, presidents have often modified, delayed, or abandoned preferred courses of action in the face of real or anticipated criticism. Whether or not (according to the old adage) Congress disposes what a particular president proposes depends on the political skill and persuasion each participant brings to the process. BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS One of the ironies of the cold-war era is that the creation of a vast bureaucracy designed to strengthen executive control over national security policies actually diffused the process by adding competing institutional perspectives. The urban geography and the architecture of Washington and the surrounding vicinity reflect these changes. The ornate Victorian structure next to the White House once known as the State, War, and Navy Building is now the Executive Office Building and houses the president’s National Security Council staff. A squat, modern State Department now holds quarters in Foggy Bottom, on 21st Street, along with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Across the Potomac in Arlington sits the huge Pentagon Building, the seat of a defense establishment employing more than three million Americans and spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Occupying even more acreage in Langley, Virginia, is the Central Intelligence Agency, while twenty buildings at Fort Meade, Maryland, comprise the lesser known but larger and more expensive National Security Agency, where fifty thousand employees and underground computers monitor much of the world’s communications. Along the interstate highway surrounding Washington are hundreds of think tanks and other “beltway bandits” under contract to do research, primarily for the military establishment.

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No longer a charming southern town, Washington has become, in Ernest May’s phrase, “Yes, a city. But at heart a military headquarters, like the Rome of the Flavians or the Berlin of the Hohenzollerns.”39 One result is clear: proliferating institutions bring more diversity and conflict to the policy process. Building on the seminal works of Harvard scholars Graham Allison and Ernest May, students of bureaucratic politics emphasize that there is no single “maker” of foreign policy.40 Policy emerges instead from a mesh of large organizations and political actors who may have real differences on particular issues and who battle to advance their own personal and departmental interests as they attempt to shape policy. The president, despite his constitutional authority, is not omnipotent; he is only one chief among many. Not even strong executives like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon can fully tame the bureaucratic beast. Policies become “political resultants,” as Graham Allison has put it—“resultants in the sense that what happens is not chosen…but rather results from compromise, conflict, and confusion of officials with diverse interests and unequal influence; political in the sense [of]…bargaining along regularized channels among individual members of government.”41 Even when the president makes a firm policy decision, the process does not stop because decisions are often ignored or carried out contrary to the original intent. President Ronald Reagan may have envisaged his Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”) as a workable program to shield entire populations from the threat of nuclear war, but hard-liners in the Pentagon saw it primarily as an antiballistic missile (ABM) defense that would offer a technological advantage over the Soviet Union and stifle public agitation for more substantial arms control proposals.42 Because large bureaucracies operate according to set routines and standard procedures, familiar scenarios derived from experience form the basis for options furnished the president. Thus, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations asked the US military to fight an unconventional war in Vietnam, it did what most organizations do in such circumstances: it followed established doctrines and procedures, modifying them only slightly in deference to different conditions and executive preferences.43 Proponents of presidential predominance often assert that 535 members of Congress cannot possibly micromanage foreign policy. In truth, neither can the White House much of the time. Even during a crisis when a skilled president personally monitors performance, as John F.Kennedy sought to do with the navy’s “quarantine” during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, bureaucratic routines and procedures are so complicated that things automatically happen without presidential volition. The former PT-boat commander was astonished to learn that antisubmarine warfare units were regularly forcing Soviet submarines to the surface, thereby precipitating the hair-trigger confrontations he was trying so hard to avoid.44 Similarly, despite assurances by the Central Intelligence Agency that no pilot would ever be captured alive, President Dwight D.Elsenhower’s personal approval of each U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union could not prevent Francis Gary Power’s

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spy plane from being shot down on the eve of the Paris Summit in May 1960—a diplomatic disaster that was compounded by Eisenhower’s recitation and subsequent repudiation of the routine cover story about a US weather plane straying over Soviet air space.45 The buck may stop with the president, but he can deal only those cards brought to the game by the relevant institutional participants. Bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to innovation. General Leonard Wood liked to quote the US Army bureau chief who complained in 1898: “This is awful. I just had my office in the best shape it was ever in; and along comes this [Spanish-American] war and upsets everything.” 46 FDR, who enjoyed the bureaucratic give-and-take as much as any president, once expressed exasperation with his favorite armed service. “To change anything in the Na-a-vy,” he said, “is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.”47 Just as the navy blocked plans to construct a battleship for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the institutional aversion to giving warships to a foreign power nearly killed the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain in the summer of 1940.48 Only by getting eight bases in direct exchange for the destroyers could Roosevelt convince the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, to certify, as required by law, that these vessels were not essential to national defense.49 The president reportedly threatened to fire Stark if he did not support what nearly every naval officer opposed. 50 The navy’s subsequent impatience to begin Atlantic convoys in the summer of 1941 and the air force strategy that autumn of reinforcing the Philippines with B-17s were designed in part to retain ships and planes that FDR might have given to the British or Russians.51 Inertia in the face of war was matched by bureaucratic bewilderment at the collapse of communism in 1989. “There are file drawers of contingency plans in the Pentagon for fighting all kinds of wars that can never be fought,” Richard Barnet noted, “but the White House clearly had no contingency plans for what to do in the face of Cold War victory.”52 When government agencies do not know what to do, they do what they know. Clinging to the status quo, those institutions with a vested interest in combatting the Red Menace now saw Soviet weakness and new regional rivalries as sufficient reason to maintain current programs. “The challenges of this world,” President Bush avowed in November 1991, “are as daunting as Stalin’s army was menacing forty years ago.” 53 “Getting the bureaucracy to accept new ideas,” Ambassador Chester Bowles once said, “is like carrying a double mattress up a very narrow and winding stairway. It is a terrible job, and you exhaust yourself when you try it. But once you get the mattress up it is awfully hard for anyone else to get it down.”54 Bureaucratic “leaks” punctuate the policy process as well, although as often as not these leaks emanate from the White House itself. Tips are given to favorite columnists: the latest intelligence about Soviet SS-20s in eastern

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Europe, or documentary proof that the Guatemalan government is purchasing arms from communist Czechoslovakia are provided for the purpose of furthering administration policies. Hawkish subordinates can sometimes prod a reluctant president by passing alarming information, as with the premature release of the Gaither Report and intelligence estimates about a “missile gap” in the late 1950s.55 Most notorious, however, have been those leaks meant to embarrass the government for the purpose of reversing its policy. A highranking air force officer, possibly General Henry “Hap” Arnold, gave a copy of the Army’s top secret “Rainbow Five” war plan to isolationist Senator Burton K.Wheeler, who in turn leaked it to the Chicago Tribune where it was published in full on 4 December 1941, just three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.56 Even more infamous was Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, one of several damaging leaks that prompted President Nixon to organize an extra-legal “Plumbers Unit” to plug up further indiscretions, an innovation that resulted in the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s eventual resignation. The bureaucratic axiom “where you stand depends on where you sit” also skews the policy process. On one level, it suggests that an individual adopts the values, priorities, and mission of his or her departmental position within the government. Caspar W.Weinberger, for example, earned the sobriquet “Cap the Knife” for his fiscal orthodoxy as budget director under Richard Nixon, but as secretary of defense in the Reagan administration he eagerly supported a huge military build-up that eventually led to record budget deficits.57 Prior to the Reagan years it was virtually automatic that anyone who headed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency enthusiastically backed nuclear arms negotiations, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff invariably viewed with deep skepticism. 58 Similarly, diplomats stationed abroad can fall victim to “localitis”—that is, they come to reflect the views of their host government, just as Joseph P.Kennedy embraced appeasement as ambassador to Britain in 1938– 40, and as Chester Bowles befriended Jawaharlal Nehru in his missions to India in the 1950s and 1960s.59 Propinquity can also breed contempt, as a whole generation of Soviet experts recoiled from the Stalinist excesses of the 1930s and applied hard-line lessons from their collective experience during the coldwar era.60 Scholars dispute whether ideological core values shared by so-called national security managers count more in determining policy than do differences attributable to bureaucratic position.61 For such “wise men” as Averell Harriman, Robert A.Lovett, and John J.McCloy, whose membership in the foreign policy establishment spanned nearly a half century and cut across bureaucratic and partisan lines, ideals of public service undoubtedly mattered more than any particular job.62 Yet McCloy, for example, advocated early intervention and a full-scale military effort as assistant secretary of war during 1941–5, then championed the revival and reintegration of Germany as high commissioner to Bonn after World War II, and later pushed hard for arms control as President Kennedy’s disarmament adviser.63 More often than not, intramural struggles

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between hawks and doves during the Cold War reflected real institutional differences. Whether it was civilian theorists of limited war in the 1960s debating military professionals whose watchword from Korea was “Never Again,” or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigning in protest after the abortive mission to rescue the hostages being held in Iran, or Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt warring for President Reagan’s attention on nuclear policy, such battles along the Potomac produced flawed outcomes. Although the tugging and hauling may be over tactics more than strategy, over pace rather than direction, those differences matter significantly when the policy compromises are gradual escalation in Vietnam, humiliation in Iran, and a deadlocked disarmament process and disarray in NATO. The more institutions involved in formulating a particular foreign policy, the more difficult it is to coordinate that policy. Consider recent diplomatic relations with Japan. For decades the main issue between Washington and Tokyo centered on American military bases in Japan and the collective effort to contain China and the Soviet Union. The State Department and Pentagon made sure that no trade disputes could disturb the security relationship. In the 1980s, however, when Japan’s huge exports produced a trade imbalance that assumed threatening proportions, other Washington agencies jumped in. “Basically there was a small circle of players you could count on one hand,” the head of the State Department’s Office of Japanese Affairs recalled. “Now, because our interests are so interdependent and our foreign policy so intertwined with domestic economic issues, you have so many more players—State, Treasury, Commerce, the Trade Representative, Pentagon, Justice, Council of Economic Advisers all need to be in the room.”64 In fact, three groups vied for control of the policies to be adopted in relations with Japan. The State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council wanted to maintain the traditional relationship, that of subordinating trade issues to security cooperation. The Commerce Department and Office of the United States Trade Representative advocated sanctions to break down the formal and informal barriers that Japan had built to protect its domestic markets. The Treasury, Office of Management and Budget, and the Council of Economic Advisers were dominated by free-trade zealots who opposed any government attempts to manage trade, even with Japan. President George Bush, whose earlier experience as head of the American diplomatic mission in Beijing gave him an exaggerated view of China’s importance in Asia, found it hard to focus on Japan. Instead of reconciling the competing wings of his own government, Bush lurched between supporting managed trade one week, free trade the next, and subtle Japan-bashing on other occasions. A zig-zag pattern persisted through the end of Bush’s presidency. Even the Iran-Contra imbroglio, often depicted as a struggle between the executive and the legislative branches, can also be seen as the unintended consequence of bureaucratic infighting run amok. Despite strong opposition from Secretary of State George P.Shultz and Defense Secretary Weinberger to

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trading arms for hostages with Iran, President Reagan encouraged such a dubious policy to proceed, and eventually to intermingle with the secret program of supplying the Nicaraguan Contras, by making the National Security Council staff responsible for both covert operations. Since clandestine activities required compartmentalization, secrecy, and deniability, National Security Advisers Robert C.McFarlane and John M.Poindexter were able to direct the operations in total disregard of Congress, almost completely outside the purview of State and Defense, and indeed of virtually the entire structure of government. The action officer in charge of both operations, Lt-Col. Oliver North, was a “can do” marine, a superpatriotic Vietnam veteran who found it hard to conceal his contempt for Congress, professional diplomats, and traditional bureaucrats. “Colonel North was given a very broad charter,” Poindexter later commented, “and I did not micromanage him.”65 When North discovered a way to take profits from the Iranian arms sales and divert the monies to the Contras, Poindexter approved but did not tell President Reagan. In effect, the “buck stopped” with Poindexter because he wanted the president “to have some deniability so that he would be protected.”66 In attempting to explain what went wrong in Iran-Contra, Secretary Weinberger blamed the fiasco on “people with their own agenda,” a few strategically placed insiders who deceived the president by feeding him the wrong information and excluding “views that they suspected, quite correctly most of the time, differ from theirs.”67 Secretary Shultz also portrayed the president as an innocent dupe misled by his inner circle. Nonetheless, the record is clear that at all top-level meetings on Iran-Contra, President Reagan spoke more than any of his advisers, forcefully steered discussions, and made basic decisions, whether or not he subsequently approved every operational detail. Actually, Weinberger and Shultz were overruled on policies they regarded as ill-advised and probably illegal. They might have resigned in protest, as Cyrus Vance had done in 1980, but they chose to be good soldiers. They remained willfully ignorant of operational particulars in what amounted to a breakdown in the American system of government. It is almost an afterthought to note that the policy initiatives with regard to Iran and Nicaragua ended in failure. CONCLUSION The foregoing discussion of the American foreign policy process does not claim to be definitive. By highlighting interactions between Congress and the presidency and competitive dynamics within the executive branch, the essay slights what some political scientists consider the “outer circles” of the policymaking process. The effect of public opinion, the role of pressure groups and lobbies, the quasi-official influence of the press and media (the so-called fourth branch of government), shifting structures of socio-economic power within society, cultural and ideological values need to be taken into account by historians of American foreign relations, who must attempt to fit these additional pieces into the larger mosaic.

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Nor does the emphasis on intramural conflict and accidental outcomes necessarily invalidate interpretations of American diplomacy that stress consistent patterns and purpose over the long run. Despite sharp breaks and reversals of policy, there has usually been general agreement throughout American history about essential national interests—a working consensus about the goals of foreign policy. The debates have been about tactics: how best to expand into what territories; whether to have formal or informal empire; how to create and maintain a favorable international order; how to protect democratic values at home and abroad without compromising those ideals. Viewed from a global perspective, sudden alterations in the international system, as in the aftermath of World War II and with the dissolution of the Soviet empire after 1989, can virtually compel policy changes, irrespective of internal debates, by eliminating adversaries and conditions that had justified previous policies. In short, the history of American foreign relations involves more than the workings of the policy process. Franklin Roosevelt once wrote that he “had little sympathy with Copernicus” who “looked through the right end of the telescope, thus greatly magnifying his problems. I use the wrong end of the telescope and it makes things much easier to bear.” 68 This whimsical statement suggests that presidents prefer to focus on the larger picture, to see themselves piloting the ship of state toward some clear destination, even as they tack according to the political winds of the moment, alter course because of bureaucratic or Congressional opposition, or turn 180 degrees in search of quick-fix solutions. Historians who take the trouble to chart a particular policy by looking inside the governmental process should not be surprised when it comes out in unexpected places. NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

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As quoted in David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937– 41, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982, p. 177. Theodore A.Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt & Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941, rev. ed., Lawrence, Kan., 1991, p. xiv. H.W.Brands, “Fractal History, or Clio and the Chaotics,” Diplomatic History, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 495–510. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford, Calif., 1962; Lucien S.Vandenbroucke, “Anatomy of a Failure: The Decision to Land at the Bay of Pigs,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 99, 1984, pp. 471–91; John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York, 1982. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. vii. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, New York, 1957. See especially Michael J.Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, New York, 1987; and Melvyn P.Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford, Calif., 1992. For a convenient summary of the different historiographical and analytical

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J.Garry Clifford approaches, see Michael J.Hogan and Thomas G.Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, New York, 1991. Roger Hilsman, The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs, New York, 1971, p. 8. Edwin S.Corwin, The President: Office and Powers 1787–1957, 4th ed., New York, 1957, p. 171. For other major works on Congress, the presidency, and foreign affairs, see Cecil V.Crabb Jr and Pat M.Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President and Foreign Policy, Washington, 1980; Robert A.Dahl, Congress and Foreign Policy, New York, 1950; I.M.Destler, Presidents, Bureaucrats, and Foreign Policy, Princeton, N.J., 1972; Thomas N.Frank and Edward Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress, New York, 1979; Martha L.Gibson, Weapons of Influence: The Legislative Veto, American Foreign Policy, and the Irony of Reform, Boulder, Colo., 1992; Louis Henkin, Constitutionalism, Democracy, and Foreign Affairs, New York, 1990; John T.Rourke, Congress and the Presidency in U.S. Foreign Policymaking: A Study of Interaction and Influence, 1945–82, Boulder, Colo., 1983, and Presidential Wars and American Democracy: Rally Round the Chief, New York, 1992; Francis O.Wilcox, Congress, The Executive, and Foreign Policy, New York, 1971; Abraham D.Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs and Constitutional Power: The Origins, Cambridge, Mass., 1976. Article VI of the Constitution. Ervin H.Pollack (ed.), The Brandeis Reader, New York, 1956, p. 134. Rourke, Congress and the Presidency, p. xiii. From 1789 to 1928 the Senate approved 86 per cent of the 786 treaties submitted to it. Royden J.Dangerfield, In Defense of the Senate: A Study in Treaty Making, Norman, Okla., 1933, pp. 91–2, 305–13; Denna Frank Fleming, The Treaty Veto of the American Senate, New York, 1930, pp. 50–1. Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, New York, 1976. David M.Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War, Colombia, Mo., 1973. W.Stull Holt, Treaties Defeated by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle Between President and Senate Over the Conduct of Foreign Relations, Baltimore, Md, 1933, pp. 100–20. Charles C.Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798–1873, Baltimore, Md, 1938. Holt, Treaties Defeated by the Senate, pp. 177–95. For Wilson and the Senate, see Lloyd E.Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, Cambridge, Mass., 1987; Thomas A.Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal, New York, 1945; Arthur S.Link, Woodrow Wilson: War, Revolution, and Peace, Arlington Heights, III., 1979; Seward W.Livermore, Politics is Adjourned: Woodrow Wilson and the War Congress, 1916–1918, Middletown, Conn., 1966; Ralph A.Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations, New York, 1973. For important works on Congress and foreign policy in the 1930s, see Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P.Nye and American Foreign Relations, Minneapolis, Minn., 1962 and Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945, Lincoln, Neb., 1984; Robert A.Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality, Chicago, 1962; John E.Wiltz, In Search of Peace: The Senate Munitions Inquiry, 1934–1936, Baton Rouge, La, 1963. Robert A.Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, Baltimore, Md, 1969, p. 37. For an important study that argues that Congress actually moved faster than FDR prior to Pearl Harbor, see David L.Porter, The Seventy-Sixth Congress and World War II, 1939–1940, Columbia, Mo., 1979. My own research concludes that the president overestimated the strength and cohesion of Congressional isolationists in 1940. J.Garry Clifford and Samuel R.Spencer Jr, The First Peacetime Draft, Lawrence, Kan., 1986.

Institutions and the policy process 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

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Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, chap. 30; Richard W.Steele, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 94, 1979, pp. 15–32. Congressional Record, 14 April 1971, p. 10355. Quoted in Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr, The Imperial Presidency, Boston, 1973, p. 129. Quoted in Thomas G.Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War, New York, rev. ed., 1992, p. 160. “In the early years, Congress was a willing, if usually silent, accomplice in the formation of Vietnam policies. Dissent developed slowly and assumed significant proportions only at the very end of the war.” George C.Herring, “The Executive, Congress, and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975,” in Michael Barnhart (ed.), Congress and United States Foreign Policy, Albany, N.Y., 1987, p. 176. See especially P.Edward Haley, Congress and the Fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia, Rutherford, N.J., 1982, and John Lehman, The Executive, Congress and Foreign Policy: Studies of the Nixon Administration, New York, 1974. Loch K.Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation, Lexington, Ky, 1985. Peter Jay, quoted in Rourke, Congress and the Presidency, p. 288. Thomas G.Paterson, “Oversight or Afterview?: Congress, the CIA, and Covert Operations Since 1947,” in Barnhart (ed.), Congress and United States Foreign Policy, p. 155. See especially the Tower Commission Report, Report of the President’s Special Review Board, New York, 1987. Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, New York, 1991, p. 596. Joint committees, The Iran-Contra Affair, Washington, 1987, p. 426. Michael J.Glennon, “The Gulf War and the Constitution,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, 1991, p. 84. Otto Passman, quoted in Wm Roger Louis, “Dulles, Suez, and the British,” in Richard Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, Princeton, N.J., 1990, p. 146. Quoted in Michael R.Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960– 63, New York, 1991, p. 199. Ernest R.May, “The U.S. Government, a Legacy of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, vol. 16, 1992, p. 270. Graham T.Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Boston, 1971; Graham T.Allison and Morton H.Halperin, “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications,” World Politics, vol. 24, 1972, pp. 40–80; Ernest R.May, The “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, New York, 1973; and May, The Truman Administration and China, 1945–1949, Philadelphia, Pa, 1975. Allison, Essence of Decision, p. 162. Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control, New York, 1984. Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, Washington, 1979; Robert W.Komer, Bureaucracy at War: U.S. Performance in the Vietnam Conflict, Boulder, Colo., 1986; and Wallace J.Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in Vietnam, 1964–1968, Berkeley, Calif., 1980. Allison, Essence of Decision, p. 138. Michael R.Beschloss, Mayday: The U-2 Affair, New York, 1986. Quoted in John Garry Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920, Lexington, Ky, 1972, p. 7. M.S.Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers, New York, 1951, p. 336. Thomas R.Maddux, Years of Estrangement: American Relations with the Soviet Union, 1933–1941, Tallahassee, Fl., 1980, pp. 87–8.

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James R.Leutze, Bargaining for Supremacy: Anglo-American Naval Collaboration, 1937–1941, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977, ch. 8. John Callan O’Laughlin memorandum of telephone conversation with Herbert Hoover, 16 August 1940, Box 45, O’Laughlin Mss, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; William R.Castle Jr, diary, 20 September 1940, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Waldo H.Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D.Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, New York, 1988, pp. 42–4, 144. Richard J.Barnet, “Reflections: After the Cold War,” New Yorker, vol. 65, 1990, p. 66. Quoted in William G.Hyland, “The Case for Pragmatism,” Foreign Affairs: America and the World 1991192, vol. 71, 1992, p. 40. Quoted in Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days, New York, 1967 ed., p. 627. For evidence that intra-service rivalries and hawkish defense intellectuals pushed American nuclear strategy and force levels well beyond the objectives sought by presidents, see David Alan Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security, vol. 7, 1983, pp. 3–71, and “Reality and Responsibility: Power and Process in the Making of United States Nuclear Strategy, 1954–1968,” Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 9, 1986, pp. 35–52; Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York, 1983. Thomas Fleming, “The Big Leak,” American Heritage, vol. 38, 1987, pp. 64–71. Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, New York, 1990. Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II, New York, 1979. Michael R.Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, New York, 1980; Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990. Hugh De Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947, Chicago, 1980; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War, Boston, 1977. See especially Robert J.Art, “Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy: A Critique,” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 467–90; and Stephen D.Krasner, “Are Bureaucracies Important, (or Allison Wonderland),” Foreign Policy, vol. 7, 1972, pp. 159–79. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, New York, 1986. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J.McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment, New York, 1992. Thomas J.Friedman, “America’s Japan Policy: Fractured Vision,” New York Times Magazine, 28 June 1992, p. 24. Quoted in Draper, A Very Thin Line, p. 565. Quoted in Draper, A Very Thin Line, p. 560. Quoted in Draper, A Very Thin Line, p. 567. FDR to Felix Frankfurter, 11 March 1943, in Max Freedman (ed.), Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945, Boston, 1967, p. 692.

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Economic interest and United States foreign policy Emily S.Rosenberg

As the Soviet Union crumbled and the Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, US policymakers and analysts increasingly articulated the country’s national interests in terms of economic goals. Grim trade statistics, a declining dollar, and a spate of books examining the precipitous decline of American economic power promoted the view that America’s revitalization within a global economy needed to take center stage in the formulation of foreign policy, With the end of the Soviet Union and the KGB, officials of the CIA spoke of recasting their cold-war mission to emphasize “economic intelligence.” Similarly, in the first presidential election after the end of the Cold War (1992), most of the aspiring candidates emphasized international economic competitiveness as their foremost goal in foreign policy. President George Bush rushed to finalize the North American Free Trade Agreement to send to Congress just before the election. Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, in the first major foreign policy address of his campaign, promised to “elevate economics in foreign policy, [to] create an economic security council similar to the National Security Council.”1 Touting the importance of economic interests in foreign policy became so commonplace following the end of the Cold War that policy discourses of the early 1990s asserting the prominence of economics in foreign policy hardly seemed a remarkable, and much less a contestable, assumption. Earlier in this century, however, scholarly accounts that elevated economic interest to a prominent role in foreign policy generated great controversy. The reason is not hard to divine: interpretations that stressed economics tended to be joined to radical critiques of American foreign policy and of America itself. Economic interpretations were hotly contested, often portrayed as subversive, and sometimes labeled Marxist, whether they were or not. To clarify and make more concrete the historical debates related to the role of economic interest in foreign policy, it may be useful to focus on three interpretive traditions. Scott Nearing, though not a historian, helped formulate a socialist critique in the 1920s that emphasized revisionist views on World War I and an anti-imperialist analysis of US policy. Charles Beard, probably the most influential American historian of the twentieth century, popularized non37

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socialist economic interpretations of history during the 1920s and 1930s. William Appleman Williams, a historian associated with the “Wisconsin school,” built upon Beard’s economic interpretation and dissenting tradition during the period of the Cold War. All three of these writers emphasized the role of economic interest in foreign policy as part of their critique of the existing order. They all had a vision of radical change for American society, were social activists, and presented controversial and influential formulations of American history. The positions that they articulated and the debates that they helped to generate significantly shaped the historiographical discourses of the eras in which they lived. Especially since the end of the Cold War, however, it may be that interpretations stressing economic interest are becoming less contentious and increasingly dissociated from dissenting perspectives. After examining several of the traditions of economic interpretation in the history of American foreign relations, this essay will assess some reasons for the apparent decline of controversy over this issue. SCOTT NEARING: SOCIALIST DISSENT AGAINST WAR AND IMPERIALISM Scott Nearing was a major critic of “dollar diplomacy” in the 1920s. His writings and activities in that decade argued that US capitalist elites and their search for profits produced both imperialism and war. Nearing’s radical views kept him out of academic life. He received his graduate training in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, studying under the renowned Simon Patten. But unlike most economists of his time, he spent his summers on a communal farm—with Upton Sinclair and other unconventional thinkers—and was strongly influenced by the radical, egalitarian doctrines of Henry George and Edward Bellamy. After accepting a faculty position at Wharton, Nearing outraged many of the school’s alumni by his critique of inequality in American life. One letter, which referred to Nearing, condemned teachers “who talk wildly and in a manner entirely inconsistent with Mr. Wharton’s well-known views and in defiance of the conservative opinions of men of affairs.”2 Nearing was quickly dismissed from his job. Although his case was taken up by the newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP), who subsequently condemned the University of Pennsylvania for its actions, another short and stormy stint at the University of Toledo ended Nearing’s academic career.3 During World War I, Nearing formed a pacifist group and began to write pamphlets for the Socialist Party, expounding the thesis associated with V.I.Lenin, that capitalism’s surplus profits and overproduction led to imperialism and then to war. For these writings, he was indicted under the Espionage Act.4 As Nearing’s case demonstrated, those who supported the “war to save the world for democracy” hotly opposed economic interpretations of America’s entry into the war. Such interpretations seemed especially subversive after Lenin’s new Bolshevik

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government in Russia in 1917 withdrew from the war, repudiated foreign property rights, and urged that class struggle within nations should replace elite-based conflicts between them. Although Nearing left the Socialist Party in 1922, he continued to frame his analyses of foreign policy around links between capitalists at home and imperialism (and consequent war) abroad. Drawing from both his domestic populism and from Marxism, he elaborated the view that government, operating closely with business elites, preferred to protect investment opportunities abroad rather than pursue economic policies that would alleviate class inequality at home. The dollar, and monied interests generally, guided diplomacy in the direction of imperialism, which led to exploitation of the lower classes at home and abroad. He was an important promoter of revisionist views on the causes of World War I and became even better known as a major critic of dollar diplomacy, the practice of using American private bank loans to “stabilize” areas deemed to be in the national interest. Although Nearing had little standing in the historical (or economics) profession because of his activism and lack of a university appointment, his ideas nonetheless had a considerable impact. From 1924 to 1926 he served as president of the American Fund for Public Service, commonly known as the Garland Fund. Guiding the Fund’s grant efforts, Nearing encouraged the circulation of dissenting publications through creation of the Vanguard Press and underwrote a new series of books called “Studies in American Imperialism.” For the latter project he enlisted, as series editor, the wellknown World War I revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes.5 Although the series finally produced only a few books, most of them became widely read and cited in academic circles, and several remain standard works in the history of relations between Latin America and the United States.6 Meanwhile, Nearing himself collaborated with Joseph Freeman on a famous book, published in 1925, called Dollar Diplomacy. Nearing and Freeman’s study traced the political impact of the loans made by American bankers, charging that US foreign policy was increasingly guided by the investment decisions of capitalists and their subsequent demands for protection of their property interests abroad.7 Although Nearing’s historical interpretations often corresponded to Lenin’s formulations, his distrust of the international connections of bankers and of the close relationship between private bank loans and US foreign policy by no means fell outside of the mainstream of American attitudes in the 1920s and 1930s. His critique was part of a larger, quite widely held, view that World War I had been caused mainly by the greed of economic elites. During the interwar period, many groups propounded the notion that economic competition among national business elites produced both international conflicts and social injustice. Jane Addams and Emily Balch, for example, worked from the same premises as they guided the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—and both received Nobel Peace Prizes. The book and movie versions of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the

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Western Front popularized the economic interpretation and revisionist view of the war. Revisionist histories, questioning Germany’s culpability and Allied motives, became widely influential. Moreover, politicians nurtured on the long tradition of midwestern anti-bank populism, disaffected by the decline of farm prices during the 1920s and by the spreading international depression after 1930, also maintained a steady opposition to the influence of bankers in foreign policy. In Congressional hearings throughout the 1920s, these “anti-imperialist” members of Congress, often drawing on the Garland Fund’s studies, opposed governmental efforts to assist in the collection of foreign bonds and dissented from supporting military action in countries controlled through American financial receiverships (Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti). In the most dramatic and influential Congressional hearing of the interwar period, the Nye Committee of 1934 concluded that a conspiracy of “munitions-makers” and bankers had been responsible for American entry into World War I. A critical economic interpretation of foreign policy probably had more popular acceptance in the period between the two world wars than at any other time in the twentieth century. In the era before World War II, Nearing’s work helped to promote an economic interpretation of foreign policy and stimulated both academic and public debate over “dollar diplomacy.” But an overtly Marxist school of interpretation never became very dominant in the historiography of US foreign relations. Following Nearing’s lead, later generations of Marxist-oriented historians—especially Philip Foner, Sidney Lens, Harry Magdoff and Gabriel Kolko—emphasized the inevitability of class conflict, the identification of imperialism as a stage of capitalism, the suggestion that the capitalist nationstate was a creature of the owners of the means of production, and the idea that social organization and ideas were mere “superstructure” to material relationships. According to their theoretical perspective, capitalist economic expansion, sponsored by business and government elites, led inevitably to international conflict abroad and class conflict at home. Rhetoric of morality, self-defense, promotion of liberty and other common justifications for policy couched real, material motives.8 Such Marxist-oriented histories reenforced the identification between political radicalism and an emphasis on economic interest in foreign policy. With Marxist scholars dwelling so often on economic topics, conservative historians tended to stress the strategic or moralistic dimensions of foreign policy and to emphasize evidence that questioned economic motivations or business influence. During the same period that nurtured Nearing’s studies of US imperialism and the weak beginnings of a tradition of Marxist scholarship in the field of United States foreign relations, a less coherent and nonMarxist—though still fiercely critical—economic interpretation became far more influential. Yet, as will be seen, the widespread fear of Marxism in American academic life made even this interpretation hotly controversial. This other dissenting strain, one historian disparagingly called “history with a Beard.”

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CHARLES BEARD AND ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION Foremost among those working from an economic interpretation in the interwar period was America’s best-known and most influential historian, Charles Beard. Beard admired Karl Marx as a thinker, but, unlike Nearing, Beard did not operate from a Marxist perspective nor claim connections to a Marxian socialist tradition. Never a thoroughgoing historical materialist, Beard believed that ideas (especially his own) could influence policy, that class struggle was an inappropriate framework for American life, and that reform (not revolution) could bring a democracy of goods to the American people. His book The Open Door at Home described his vision of what the United States could become: a relatively self-sufficient, prosperous middleclass country, in which the excesses of private property-holders were checked by a system of strong, nationally based planning, designed to promote the common good. Such an egalitarian society, he believed, could come only from a repudiation of economic expansionism abroad. Policies promoting greater trade and investment abroad, he suggested in The Idea of National Interest, provided the country with few economic benefits because foreign exports comprised such a small percentage of GNP. An economically expansionist foreign policy did, however, risk global conflicts that wasted enormous resources when they resulted in war.9 Beard rejected the Wilsonian liberal view that world trade, openly pursued, promoted world peace. Global economic aspirations, he instead suggested, led to wasteful and quixotic extensions of “national interest” to areas that were difficult to defend and thus to ever-larger military build-ups and far-flung international conflicts. He urged that the term “national interest” once again be identified with the strength of a continentally-bound economy rather than being defined globally by business internationalists and other expansionists. A strong nation would maximize its self-sufficiency, concentrating on building profits and new opportunities at home. Beard was part of the “New History” movement, a group of leading interwar historians who believed that history should be relevant to current problems and that it should contribute to social change. Distrusting “objectivity” and ivorytower professionalism, Beard never reentered academic life after he left Columbia in 1917 to protest the violations of freedom of speech that were associated with World War I. Economically secure due to the royalties of his popular textbooks, he immersed himself in public life and reformist causes. By the late 1930s and 1940s, his greatest energy went into denouncing America’s entry into World War II and the growth of executive-branch power that he knew would accompany an all-out war effort. He felt that a war against European fascism might, by centralizing political power at home, usher in an Americanstyle fascism. Beard’s economic interpretation lacked consistent theoretical grounding. Sometimes he suggested a special-interest-driven economic determinism. In

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the late 1920s, for example, he wrote Harry Elmer Barnes that “Probably [the] Morgans will get the American boobs to lend fifty billions more to the European powers…to loose [sic] in the next war for liberty, democracy, and Christianity. But I am not going to have any more wool pulled over my eyes if I can help it.”10 At other times, however, he developed a more structural economic interpretation, arguing that bankers and politicians did not operate in a vacuum but at the behest of the public at large, which pressured politicians to create jobs, both by cultivating export markets and by awarding military contracts. Beard was similarly unclear about the role of individuals. Did economic forces inexorably drive history or could particular individuals be held responsible for courses of action? His interwar histories featured socioeconomic structures much more than individuals. But in the late 1930s, as he mounted his impassioned pleas for the country to avoid involvements that could lead to US participation in another world war, he became more and more focused on the role of a single, misguided or even malevolent person: President Franklin D.Roosevelt. Roosevelt, he charged, was deliberately and cynically maneuvering to prepare the country to enter a war, which was contrary to its national interests.11 As Beard’s writings became more and more controversial during World War II and afterwards, many scholars attacked Beard’s inconsistencies as a way of discrediting his work.12 But Beard’s most recent biographer, Ellen Nore, is no doubt correct in arguing that “he was less a theorist than an activist,” less concerned with consistency than with asking probing, difficult and dissenting questions. 13 The influences that operated on Beard were eclectic: his Quaker heritage; his acquaintance with various traditions of European radicalism; and his involvement in the New History movement. He was a free-thinker who refused to apply any particular radical vision in a block-print manner. Beard elevated and stirred controversy around the role of economic interest in foreign policy, but he provided no theoretically consistent blueprint for an “economic interpretation.” Beard’s attention to the importance of economic interest, his belief in a usable past, his irreverent treatment of received wisdom and power, and his strident opposition to World War II and the growth of executive-branch power put him at odds with the intellectual fashions that dominated the United States in the 1950s. As postwar historians decried “ideology” and celebrated consensus, Beard’s emphasis on commitment and on conflict seemed both intellectually old-fashioned and politically suspect. Probably the best known and most influential American historian in the years leading up to World War II, by the 1950s Beard was widely dismissed by established, academic historians as a naive propagandist whose economic interpretation and relativism brought him dangerously close to Marxism.14 As pressures for cold-war conformity mounted throughout the 1950s, younger historians insistently refuted, but seldom read seriously, Beard’s works.

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WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS AND THE WISCONSIN SCHOOL Although Beard’s influence waned, another equally controversial historian, William A.Williams, reformulated many of his perspectives. Williams’s work built on Beard’s by emphasizing the centrality of economic expansionism in American foreign policy and the importance of developing dissenting perspectives. Williams, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin from 1946 to 1950, worked under Fred Harvey Harrington, the intellectual mentor for a group of diplomatic historians who became collectively known as “the Wisconsin school.” The University of Wisconsin provided a unique environment for dissenting views in the 1950s. While many other history departments across the country celebrated cold-war orthodoxies, exiling economic interpretations from respectability and removing Beard from reading lists, Wisconsin maintained an attachment to economic interpretation and to independent, unorthodox thinking. Williams’s first book after leaving graduate school, AmericanRussian Relations (1952), went against the cold-war grain by questioning the historical premises of America’s newly minted “containment” policy.15 After returning to Wisconsin as a faculty member in 1957, his work became even more controversial. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), Williams’s most influential book, expanded his critique of American foreign policy. Tragedy, which was heavily indebted to Beard’s work, argued that commercial expansion (what Williams called the “open door”) was the driving force behind US foreign policy. Most Americans, he explained, believed that domestic prosperity was linked to market expansion overseas, and he criticized the search for economic markets and stability that resulted from this assumption as a “tragedy” that led to intervention and often undercut selfdetermination and the emergence of democratic societies abroad. Open-door expansionism, he wrote, had become such an intrinsic part of American thought and policy that “empire” had become a “way of life”—to paraphrase the title of one of his subsequent books.16 Tragedy became one of the central historical works of the cold-war era. It was initially dismissed by established scholars for employing an “outmoded” economic interpretation; it was also pilloried as communist-inspired and undocumented.17 Increasingly, however, it was read and acclaimed, especially a decade later, by younger scholars who began to search for historical explanations of their country’s destructive involvement in Vietnam and its close alliances with dictatorships in the Third World. The “open door” interpretation identified the pursuit of economic interests as the driving force of foreign policy, relegating other potential motivations (defense, morality, balance-of-power politics) to secondary status. It became the central theme of a generation of scholars, most of whom did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. Williams provided the most sweeping development of the theme, but others of the so-called “Wisconsin school,” such as Walter

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LaFeber, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas McCormick and others, elaborated it in narrower studies during the 1960s and 1970s.18 There were a number of reasons why the Wisconsin school’s “open door” thesis sparked one of the most divisive controversies in American historywriting. Some critics seized upon any interpretation that highlighted economics as akin to Marxism, the same charge that had dogged Beard. Other critics noted the same ambiguity that had been present in Beard: was economic expansionism a structural necessity of American capitalism or simply a misguided policy that right-thinking people could reverse?19 Still others, again echoing earlier critics of Beard, challenged the contention that trade expansion had been a paramount policy objective and pointed out the frequently detached, or even antagonistic, relationship between government and the business community.20 Opponents of the Wisconsin school attacked both its logic and its evidential basis. Moreover, by emphasizing the economic expansionism of the United States, the “open door” thesis was closely linked to “revisionist” scholarship on the Cold War. “Traditionalist” scholars, who saw the Stalinist state in the Soviet Union as being the primary cause of a divided and endangered postwar world, were incensed by the suggestion of US culpability. These historians attacked the idea of an “open door empire” as being imprecisely defined and perversely onesided. The Wisconsin school, they charged, seemed attentive only to the domestic side of influences in US foreign policymaking, implicitly glossing over the misbehavior of other nation-states. The most extreme critic of revisionism, Robert Maddox, purported to find a deliberate pattern of falsification, though his charges were so scurrilous and overstated that he mostly undermined his own credibility.21 By linking the emphasis on economic interpretation to the revisionist stance on cold-war issues, however, Wisconsin school historians became the principal academic critics of the cold-war verities that were still strongly rooted, both in American society and in the politics of the history profession. Probably the most important element that fueled the controversy over the Wisconsin school involved the Vietnam War and the growth of “new Left” politics. Williams’s Tragedy became a kind of manifesto for the growing antiwar movement during the late 1960s. Denouncing the failure of the United States to allow an “open door for revolution” against injustice around the world as a “tragedy.” Williams spoke to a generation of activist scholars who believed that cold-war crusading had become a cover, especially in the Third World, for allying with pro-capitalist elites who suppressed movements for social justice. Vietnam provided a case in point, and Wisconsin school historians, who saw social involvement and dissent as scholarly virtues, tended to be outspoken in their opposition to the war. (Williams continued to oppose the war but left Wisconsin for Oregon State University because of his dislike for the growing militancy and cultural radicalism among members of the antiwar student movement in Madison.) As was the case with most American institutions during the late 1960s and

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early 1970s, the historical profession was bitterly divided over the issue of the Vietnam War. The Wisconsin school, playing the dissenting role, allied with and provided a framework of analysis for the antiwar “new Left.” And conservative scholars, laboring overtime to refute those works that may have been influenced by Beard and Williams, ironically helped to place the “open door” thesis at the very center of scholarly debates. By the early 1970s, controversy over an economic interpretation of US foreign policy had become what historian Bradford Perkins aptly characterized as “a battle, not a dialogue.”22 As both of the Vietnam wars—the one in Southeast Asia and the domestic one over foreign policy—waned after the mid-1970s, the controversies over “new Left” historiography also subsided. A growing number of scholars continued to write from perspectives influenced, in some ways, by the Wisconsin school’s economic interpretation; others continued to refute the importance of economic interests. But, slowly, the context of historical debates shifted and began to undermine the long-standing discursive connections between attention to economic factors and dissenting or critical perspectives. THE DECLINE OF CONTROVERSY The gradual decline of controversy over the role of economics in US foreign relations may be related to three trends: new interpretive turns in histories of foreign relations; a shifting of focus in radical or dissenting scholarship; and changes in the economic and political positions of the United States and the Soviet Union in the world. First, historians of foreign relations writing in the late 1970s and 1980s incorporated much of the Wisconsin school’s scholarship but blunted its critical, dissenting edge. A new “corporatist” interpretation, for example, built upon the Wisconsin school’s premise that government sought economic expansion. The corporatist view emphasized the coalescence of government bureaucracies working in tandem with organized functional groups—businesses, agriculture, labor, professionals—to spread economic, political, and cultural forms that were congenial to US interests. Corporatist scholars also drew upon the research of more conservative business and “organizational” historians who were studying the emergence of corporate and governmental bureaucracies. Viewed from this perspective, the new bureaucratic elites that began to emerge after the turn of the century worked together to stabilize the industrial order and extend their influence internationally.23 Michael Hogan, whose work on the interwar period and study of the Marshall Plan most fully elaborated this perspective, explained that a corporatist interpretation “focuses on the role of functional elites rather than governing classes, and traces the connection between foreign policy and ongoing changes in the industrial and political structure.”24 During the interwar period, he found an emerging cooperation among Anglo-American elites in such areas as international communications and finance.25 In the case of the later Marshall

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Plan, Hogan showed how the joint efforts of similar European and American elites became institutionalized in new postwar agencies that worked to revive a strong, anti-communist Europe and to stabilize global economic patterns generally.26 Corporatist interpretations were rooted in assumptions that state and private interests were alike in pursuing economic advantage, but, more importantly, stressed the complexity of both motivation and process in policymaking and avoided a thoroughgoing economic interpretation of history.27 Moreover, corporatist historians displayed little of the dissenting style of a Beard or a Williams, nor did they overtly push radical economic agendas through their histories. Hogan insisted that his interpretation was compatible, as a conceptual framework, even with the anti-revisionist, anti-Williams views that adhered to the primacy of geopolitics. For Hogan at least, corporatism offered a potential “synthesis” that could accommodate all sides of the fierce debates that raged over economic interpretation.28 Whereas Beard and Williams had sought to stir controversy, Hogan advanced his corporatist synthesis in hopes of soothing it. The subject of oil policy, once a part of this bitter controversy, became, during the 1970s and 1980s, a prime example of the more diffuse—and decidedly less radical—corporatist interpretation. In the 1970s, the conflicts between the United States and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) stimulated much new study of the relationship between oil companies and foreign policy during the Cold War. Many of the studies, influenced by the Wisconsin school but recast to fit the emerging corporatist perspective, emphasized how access to key natural resources became a component of cold-war national security policy. Although scholars differed in the degree to which they saw big oil interests directly influencing government policy, most stressed that policymakers and oil executives often shared mutual interests in expanding global access to oil during the Cold War. The economic goals of private businesses often, but not always, ran parallel to the national security concerns defined by governmental elites.29 A second area of new scholarship that began to burgeon during the 1980s related to the growing visibility of economic foreign policy, particularly with regard to assistance programs to developing nations in the aftermath of World War II. In the postwar period, governmental agencies that directly extended loans, grants, and various kinds of technical assistance to foreign nations, flourished as part of America’s cold-war policy to secure areas against Soviet influence. From the Marshall Plan and Point Four under the Truman administration to a wide variety of other programs (including the Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture projects, regional banks, and the Alliance for Progress), economic assistance became integral to postwar definitions of national security. Some scholars, in the tradition of Beard and Williams, argued that particular business interests identified their own well-being with national goals and that they influenced government to accept the same equation. In Bitter Fruit, for example, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer emphasized the dominance of United Fruit in the shaping

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of President Eisenhower’s policy to undermine the reformist government of Guatemala in 1954—a policy that resulted in economic destabilization and was topped off with a coup (promoted by the CIA) against the government of Jacobo Arbenz. 30 Most studies of postwar economic policies, however, emphasized less the pursuit of particular economic advantages and more the context of simplistic cold-war faith in a bipolar contest between freedom and tyranny. Richard Immerman’s study of the covert action in Guatemala, published in the same year as Schlesinger and Kinzer’s, detailed the activities of United Fruit but emphasized the rigid cold-war ideological context in Washington to which the company was able to appeal.31 Most other recent histories of postwar economic policies also emphasized the operations of cold-war bureaucratic and functional elites, but they did so in a way that leads economic interests to emerge as an important component of foreign policy, rather than the fundamental foundation of it, as in the older economic interpretations.32 Second, in the post-Vietnam era scholars associated with traditions of radical dissent themselves moved away from the emphasis on economic modes as determining historical change and began to look more carefully at the role of cultural production. Influential neo-Marxist scholars, such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in Great Britain, elaborated theories that stressed mutual interactions between the realms of economics and culture. And nonMarxist, dissenting scholarship, especially in the United States, also focused increasingly on cultural questions such as racial and gender ideologies. These shifts increasingly pushed older debates over economic interest to the sidelines. Thus the “battle” over the economic interpretation of history became a mere skirmish in the new “culture wars” that racked academic life and historical interpretations after the mid-1980s.33 Although these culture wars were slow in breaking out in the field of US foreign relations, economics certainly no longer raised temperatures or prompted intellectual battles at podiums during historical conventions. Foreign relations went from being the historical profession’s most divisive and contentious field during the era of the Vietnam War to being its most placid in the 1980s, when controversies were more likely to occur within the fields of social and cultural history. Third, rapid changes in the international order during the post-Vietnam era also placed interpretations that stressed economic factors in a more favorable light. A spate of studies in the late 1980s argued that the United States was entering a period of economic decline. Although some explanations of decline extended the economic interpretation, others worked to undermine it. Some theories of decline tied the US economic slippage to open door expansionism and the resultant creation of a world system dominated by internationalized businesses. The “core economy” in the world system (which, in the modern era, had been first Britain and then the United States) was, according to this view, becoming less a geographic place than an internationalized socio-economic group. Business elites cared more about profits from international expansion

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than about national living standards and the public good in their own nationstates. America’s decline thus seemed the ultimate result of the assistance that had been provided to multinationals by a succession of governments. Stagnation and growing inequality represented the “tragedy of American diplomacy” finally coming home, a confirmation of the basic critique developed previously by dissenting scholarship.34 But probably a more dominant, and certainly a more publicly highlighted, theory of decline undermined such an economic interpretation. Books such as Vogel’s Japan as Number 1 and other popular investigations of Japan’s rising economic power advanced the notion that Japan carefully planned and coordinated with business elites a strategy for global economic growth while the government and business community within the United States could not get their act together.35 This view suggested that the United States was capable of mounting only weak and deficient policies to promote global economic expansion. Williams’s trade expansion thesis or the corporatist interpretation of US policy looked flimsy indeed when set against Japan’s even stronger promotional policies and corporatist organization. The preoccupation with the economic weakness of the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War fed pervasive popular images of clever foreigners beating America out of its rightful place as world hegemon. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, critique of American foreign policy from this perspective was that economic interest should have been central to recent US foreign policy but that it had not been. By 1990, leaders from nearly every shading in the political spectrum were calling for new government-business partnerships in expanding foreign trade. Criticism of US economic foreign policy after the 1980s, then, was no longer the terrain primarily of the Left or of radicals. Along with the US economy, Marxist governments were also in decline. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist states of Eastern Europe, along with new disclosures about both the human and the ecological oppression that had been conducted in the name of communism, put Marxism increasingly on the defensive throughout the world. At the same time, there was an accompanying resurgence of free-market doctrines throughout the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this context, filled with celebratory images of capitalism, few Americans worried any more that accentuating economic interest in foreign policy would give grist to the spread of “dangerous” Marxist ideas. From World War I to the 1980s, then, economic interpretations of US foreign policy had been firmly joined to dissenting, radical perspectives. Highlighting the importance of economic interest in foreign policy, however, no longer seemed so radical or dangerous after the 1970s and 1980s, given the changes in academic interpretations and in global power balances. NOTES 1 Speech to Los Angeles World Affairs Council, quoted in New York Times, 14 August 1992, p. A 11.

Economic interest and foreign policy 2 3

4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19

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Quoted in Walter P.Metzger (ed.), Professors on Guard: The First AAUP Investigations, New York, reprint, 1977, pp. 138–9. Stephen J.Whitfield, Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism, New York, 1974, pp. 1–145; Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical: A Political Autobiography, New York, 1972; Ellen W.Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, New York, 1986, pp. 3–12. “Trial of Scott Nearing and the American Socialist Society,” New York, Rand School, 1919, in no. 825, Reel 141, Socialist Party Papers (microfilm edition). Merle Curti, “Subsidizing Radicalism: The American Fund for Public Service, 1921–41,” Social Service Review, vol. 33, 1959, pp. 274–95. Margaret A.Marsh, The Bankers in Bolivia: A Study in American Foreign Investment, New York, 1928; Leland H.Jenks, Our Cuban Colony: A Study in Sugar, New York, 1928; Melvin H.Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo, New York, 1928; J.Fred Rippy, The Capitalists and Colombia, New York, 1931; and Charles D.Kepner Jr and Jay H.Soothill, The Banana Empire: A Case Study of Economic Imperialism, New York, 1935. Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism, New York, 1925. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy, New York, 1969; Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose, Boston, 1969; Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire, New York, 1971; Philip S.Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902, New York, 1972. Charles A.Beard, The Open Door at Home: A Trial Philosophy of National Interest, New York, 1934 and The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy, New York, 1934. Beard to Barnes, June 24 192[7?], quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, New York, 1968, p. 320. This position was fully articulated in Charles A.Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities, New Haven, Conn., 1948. For example, John Higham, History, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965, p. 207. Ellen Nore, Charles A.Beard, An Intellectual Biography, Carbondale, III., 1983, p. x. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, New York, 1988, pp. 290–2. Ironically, by the 1940s Beard had become more critical than ever of Marxist groups because of their internationalist, pro-war stance. On Beard and Marxism, see Nore, Beard, pp. 192– 3. William A.Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947, New York, 1952. William A.Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Cleveland, 1959 and Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative, New York, 1980. Bradford Perkins,“ ‘The Tragedy of American Diplomacy’: Twenty-five Years After,” in Lloyd C.Gardner (ed.), Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic-History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, Corvallis, Ore., 1986, p. 21. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860– 1898, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963; Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy, Madison, Wis., 1964; Thomas J.McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901, Chicago, 1967. For a complete bibliography of Williams’s work and essays that suggest the direction and contributions of the “Wisconsin school” see Gardner (ed.), Redefining the Past. See, for example, Robert W.Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, Baltimore, Md, 1971.

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20

See, for example, John Braeman, “The New Left and American Foreign Policy during the Age of Normalcy: A Re-examination,” Business History Review, vol. 57, 1983, pp. 73–104; William H.Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921, Chicago, 1982. Novick, Noble Dream, pp. 448–52; Robert Maddox, The New Left and The Origins of the Cold War, Princeton, 1973. Perkins, “Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” p. 34; Novick, Noble Dream, pp. 446–56. Ellis W.Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism,’” Business History Review, vol. 52, 1978, pp. 309–20. Michael J.Hogan, “Corporatism,” in Michael J.Hogan and Thomas G.Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, New York, 1991, p. 227. Michael J.Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in AngloAmerican Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928, Columbia, Mo., 1977. Michael J.Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, New York, 1987. Other studies in this tradition include Melvyn Leffler, Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979; Emily S.Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, New York, 1982; and Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. See also Thomas J.McCormick, “Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History,” Reviews in American History, vol. 10, 1982, pp. 318–30, and Joan Hoff-Wilson, “Responses to Charles S.Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,’” Diplomatic History, vol. 5, 1981, pp. 377–82. Hogan, “Corporatism,” Explaining the History, pp. 226–36. Major recent studies of oil policy include Burton I.Kaufman, The Oil Cartel Case: A Documentary Study of Antitrust Activity in the Cold War Era, Westport, Conn., 1978; Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy, 1939–1949, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980; Irvine H.Anderson, Aramco, The United States, and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–50, Princeton, N.J., 1981; Michael B.Stoff, Oil, War, and American Security: The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941–1947, New Haven, Conn., 1980; Stephen G.Rabe, The Road to OPEC: United States Relations with Venezuela, 1919–1976, Austin, Tex., 1982; Stephen J.Randall, United States Foreign Oil Policy, 1919–1948: For Profits and Security, Montreal, 1985; David S.Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954, Baltimore, Md, 1986; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, New York, 1991. Stephen C.Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Garden City, N.Y., 1982. Richard H.Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, Austin, Tex., 1982. Examples would include Gary R.Hess, America Encounters India, 1941–1947, Baltimore, Md, 1971, and more recent studies discussed in Gary Hess, “Global Expansion and Regional Balances: The Emerging Scholarship on United States Relations with India and Pakistan,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 56, 1987, pp. 259–95; Robert J.McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–1949, Ithaca, N.Y., 1981; and Nathan Godfried, Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor: American Economic Development Policy toward the Arab East, 1942–1949, New York, 1987; Stephen G.Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy ofAnticommunism, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988; Dennis Merrill, Bread and The Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990; Peter L.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32

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Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991. 33 For a perspective from a cultural conservative see, for example, Daniel Bell, “The Culture Wars,” Wilson Quarterly, summer 1992, p. 34. 34 Such a world-systems perspective could be formulated from Marxist tenets, such as work by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays, New York, 1979; by political scientist Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse, Berkeley, Calif., 1990; by scholars associated with “dependency theory” discussed in Louis A.Pérez Jr. “Dependency,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds), Explaining the History, pp. 99–110. It could also arise from the perspective provided by Beard and Williams, as in the work of economist Robert Reich or historian Thomas McCormick. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations, New York, 1991; Thomas J.McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Baltimore, Md, 1989 and “World Systems,” in Hogan and Paterson (eds), Explaining the History, pp. 89–98. 35 Ezra F.Vogel, Japan As Number I: Lessons for America, New York, 1979.

4

Imperialism, American style, 1890–1916 Joseph A.Fry

In April 1899 Theodore Roosevelt exhorted his countrymen to meet the challenges and responsibilities of an imperial foreign policy: “If we are to be a really great people,” Roosevelt asserted, “we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.” His vision included building an isthmian canal, seizing the strategic bases necessary to decide the “destiny of the oceans of the East and the West,” and subduing and ruling the islands acquired from Spain. Three years later, Republican Senator George F.Hoar lamented the nation’s decision to follow TR’s advice. Hoar charged the United States with converting the Monroe Doctrine from a policy of “eternal righteousness and justice…to a doctrine of brutal selfishness looking only to our own advantage.” Even more tragically, by suppressing the Filipino revolution, “We crushed the only Republic in Asia…made war on the only Christian people in the East…[and] inflicted torture on unarmed men.”1 These conflicting perspectives clearly foreshadowed the difficulty historians have had in “coming to terms” with American empire. Indeed both Americans generally and many influential scholars have been loath to acknowledge that the United States had joined the European powers in the practice of imperialism after 1890. In contrast to the British who justified and took great pride in their imperial exploits, Americans have persistently denied the existence of an American empire or have labored to demonstrate that it was more benign and more transitory than its European counterparts.2 This discomfort with the existence and nature of American empire lies at the heart of the differing interpretations of United States foreign relations from 1890 to 1916. Simply defining the term “imperialism” has generated intense disagreement and frustration. As early as 1919, Joseph A.Schumpeter pronounced “The word ‘imperialism’…abused to the point where it threatens to lose all meaning.” Conscious of this ambiguity or averse to linking the United States to imperialism, many historians of this period have avoided grappling with the definition or the substance of imperialism by employing the expression “expansion” or by interpreting the period in terms of America’s rise to “world power.” Still, given the acquisition of the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Samoa; the establishment of protectorates over Cuba, Panama, and 52

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the Dominican Republic; and armed interventions in several of these countries as well as Mexico, Haiti, and Nicaragua, students of these years must acknowledge and confront directly the phenomenon of imperialism. And, they must define it. Although he was referring to jazz, musician Fats Waller has provided an applicable admonition: “Man,” Fats warned, “if you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.”3 Those most reluctant to acknowledge the existence of an American empire have defined imperialism narrowly. These scholars have essentially equated imperialism with colonialism, or the formal annexation of territory not meant to be integrated into the larger body politic. In so doing, they effectively limit American imperialism to the holding of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and separate these acquisitions from Hawaii and from previous territorial annexations on the north American continent. Thus American imperialism was a “great aberration,” a temporary, almost accidental, loss of national direction, from which the United States quickly recovered after 1900.4 By contrast, those historians most disturbed by US actions abroad have defined imperialism more broadly. While citing the holding of formal colonies as imperialistic, they have also contended that the United States had begun establishing an “informal empire” by the 1890s. These scholars emphasize that imperial control may be exercised through economic means as well as political annexations or military interventions and that the United States built an “overseas economic empire.” Because Americans had pursued commercial expansion abroad to solve internal problems since the 1780s and had expanded territorially at the expense of nonwhites throughout the nineteenth century, the imperialism of the 1890s was neither accidental nor transitory. Still other students add culture to the areas of imperial control. They define “cultural imperialism” as a stronger nation assuming the right to impose and disseminate its beliefs and values at the expense of a weaker, native culture.5 Given these widely varying definitions, one might be tempted to agree with the Australian historian Sir Keith Hancock, who pronounced “Imperialism… no word for scholars. The emotional echoes which it arouses are too violent and too contradictory. It does not convey a precise meaning.”6 But the centrality of imperialism to this period of United States foreign relations demands a working definition. The key considerations are power, control, and intent. Imperialism and hence empire exist when a stronger nation or society imposes or attempts to impose control over a weaker nation or group of people. This control may be formal (via annexations, protectorates, or military occupations) or informal (via economic control, cultural domination, or threat of intervention). The informal species of empire might involve businessmen, missionaries, and other non-state actors. Advocates of a stricter definition will protest the difficulty of measuring the degree of informal control or domination that constitutes imperialism. For example, where does normal commercial activity end and economic imperialism begin? Although absolute certainty of measurement may be unobtainable in such areas, the phenomenon of imperialism remains apparent. As Richard Graham, a historian of Latin America, observed, “It may take a

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hydraulic engineer to measure the flow of water, but anyone can see it flows downhill.”7 THE ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE A scholarly consensus on the motives for American imperialism in the period from 1890 through 1916 has been just as elusive as agreement on a definition of the phenomenon. Easily the greatest contention has centered on the influence of economic considerations. Observing the vast increase in American productivity and exports, turn-of-the-century critics of European and American imperialism cited the quest for markets and investment opportunities as the driving force behind United States foreign policy. Scholars such as Charles A.Beard and Scott Nearing subsequently developed these themes during the 1920s and 1930s; but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the “revisionist” or “new Left” school of American historians compiled the most comprehensive brief for the primacy of economic influences. Beginning in 1959 with the publication of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William A.Williams and a number of his former students emphasized the continuity of an aggressive, expansionist American foreign policy. Prior to the Civil War, the United States had constructed an empire on the north American continent; following Appomattox, the focus shifted to a “New Empire” of foreign trade with the final suppression of the native Americans serving as the crucial linkage between the two forms of empire. By the 1890s, the makers of US foreign policy sought markets rather than extensive new territories. Indeed, they practiced the “imperialism of antiimperialism” by arguing for free trade and investment and against large colonies.8 According to the revisionist argument, the pursuit of this “informal empire” intensified during the Gilded Age as repeated depressions disrupted the economy and incited an alarming level of social protest. Both farmers and manufacturers traced the core problem to overproduction, hence the need for unobstructed access to foreign markets to dispose of the “glut” and to avoid explosive outbursts such as the Homestead Strike or the Populist Movement. This compulsive search for an “open door” for foreign trade, and the attendant practice of looking abroad to solve internal problems, became the essence of American foreign policy. Building on this theoretical grounding, on world systems analysis, and on dependency theory, several more recent studies have argued that the United States emerged as a core or metropole (industrialized, commercially and militarily developed) nation during this period and pursued a foreign policy designed to dominate and exploit peripheral (weaker, nonindustrialized) countries economically and politically.9 From this perspective of more than a century of empire building, the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish islands was more a “culmination” than an “aberration” and more a product of the nation’s political economy and place in the world capitalist system than a momentary, irrational act.

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Several interlocking “chains of causes” had produced war and empire: the depression of the 1890s had solidified the consensus on the need for foreign markets; the potential for sales in China and the fear that the Europeans were about to close their spheres of influence to American trade left businessmen uneasy and the Far East second in importance only to Cuba among policymakers; and the government, particularly in the person of McKinley, formulated a partnership with business in promoting foreign trade. Both McKinley and his business constituents had concluded in mid-March 1898 that only by restoring international order and preserving domestic tranquility could trade and particularly the development of US prospects in China be pursued. Although McKinley “did not want war, he did want what only a war could provide: the disappearance of the terrible uncertainty in American political and economic life, and a solid basis from which to resume the building of the new American commercial empire.”10 With the conflict came the annexation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, not as the first steps toward a great territorial empire but as strategic outposts for safeguarding an isthmian canal and as outposts en route to the China market. According to the revisionists, both this partnership between business and government and the drive for international economic expansion remained central to the making of American foreign policy in the early twentieth century. Together with Williams, other historians have asserted that business and political leaders agreed on the need for the establishment of a liberal capitalist world order. This ideal world order would have replicated American representative government and private capitalistic enterprise, guaranteed the access of industrialized nations to the raw materials and markets of less developed countries, and instituted government action to maintain the order and stability necessary for economic penetration and growth and to protect overseas markets and investments. The practical pursuit of these objectives led the United States to oppose virtually all revolutions during these years.11 With business clamoring for aggressive government support through trade associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Asiatic Association, and establishing a worldwide presence in everything from Heinz ketchup to McCormick reapers, the “promotional state” was born. Most importantly, argue the revisionists, the United States promoted and protected American economic interests by working to exclude European influence and to suppress political and social disorder in Latin America and to enforce the open door policy of equal access for trade and investment in China. Government pursuit of these ends encompassed a broad range of actions. In Latin America, the United States threatened and carried out military interventions, established protectorates, administered customs houses, and applied political and economic pressures. The government also employed “chosen instruments” or groups of American bankers in efforts to counter Russian or Japanese influence in China or to promote order in the Caribbean through loans to favored clients. And, as the US governmentbusiness relationship solidified, the United States reformed the consular

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service, adopted “bargaining” tariffs aimed at forcing concessions from other nations, established the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce and the National Foreign Trade Council, and allowed American banks to establish branches abroad—all with an eye toward augmenting foreign commerce and investment.12 The revisionist critique of US foreign relations elicited one of the most bitter debates within the American historical profession. Opponents of the socalled “New Economic Determinists” charged them with misunderstanding and perhaps even consciously misrepresenting the history of the late nineteenth century. Rather than a period of panic and depression, the Gilded Age was, they argue, an era of growth and optimism. American business looked first to the home market, and Congress signaled its agreement with this focus by repeatedly enacting protective tariffs that impeded commercial expansion. Critics charged the revisionists with exaggerating the closeness of government-business relations. For example, there was no unimpeachable evidence that McKinley had acted principally from economic concerns. As Julius W. Pratt had argued in the 1930s, business had opposed war until the very eve of the conflict and had been “indifferent to imperialism or definitely opposed” until Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Official policy was hesitant and contradictory, and “tenuousness of the contacts…characterized the structural relationship between business and government.”13 These critics further asserted that only by concentrating on the “rhetoric” of expansionists at the expense of “objective realities” could one make the economic argument. Business was far from unitary on the issue of commercial expansion, with larger, more concentrated companies providing the bulk of the exports and smaller concerns being the most solicitous of government aid. The most successful US exporters, such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company or Standard Oil, carved out foreign markets with little government assistance, and the value of exports and investments in Europe and North America far exceeded those in Latin America or China, the focus of most expansionist strategies. Indeed, the fabled “China market” was statistically a “myth,” since it constituted only 0.3 per cent of American exports in 1890 and less than 1 per cent in 1910. Given these “realities,”.placing economic expansion at the center of US policy made the process unduly “rational” and “unitary” and helped make treatments of this period “the worst chapter in almost any book.”14 Such cautions, especially those treating the structural relations of business and government, the most successful export companies, the geographic distribution of American exports, and the overly rational portrayal of policy, are well taken. However, these critics have not refuted the depiction of the liberalcapitalist ideology which, according to the revisionists, provided the essential intellectual context for policy formation. While “realistic” trade figures are useful, they did not prevent generations of Americans from coveting potential profits in China. Finally, the Gilded Age was not an era of optimism for farmers.

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Plagued by chronic hard times, both cotton planters and midwestern producers of livestock and grain clamored for expanded export markets throughout this period. THE PRATT SCHOOL AND ITS ADHERENTS Most of the remaining writing on the motivation for American empire has investigated alternatives to the economic interpretation. Building particularly on the work of Julius W.Pratt and Samuel Flagg Bemis, who responded to Beard and Nearing in the 1930s and 1940s, and on subsequent studies by Richard Hofstadter and Ernest R.May in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars emphasizing non-economic explanations have more often portrayed US actions in the twenty-five years after 1890 as humane and well-meaning rather than selfish and exploitive, as ad hoc and accidental rather than systemic and predictable, and as breaking with rather than continuing American foreign policy traditions. Like the revisionists, Hofstadter and Robert Dallek linked foreign policy to domestic events; however, they contend that the American public’s response can be understood best in psychological rather than material terms. Buffeted by the post-1893 depression, by the Populist Movement, by the growth and consolidation of big business, by urbanization and the changing nature of immigration, by the labor violence, and by the ostensible closing of the frontier, the nation experienced a “psychic crisis.” Americans channeled their domestic frustrations and humanitarian concerns into a chauvinistic, jingoistic foreign policy; both the war and colonial empire “had more to do with relieving internal strains than with serving American interests abroad.”15 Extending this argument, other historians have decried the nation’s failure to deliberately weigh “interests and responsibilities.” Instead of acting from “political realism” (or economic self-interest), the nation had gone to war out of an “explosive combination of altruism and self-assertive national egoism” and acquired an “empire in a fit of absent-mindedness.”16 The concept of national hysteria driving the nation to war raised the crucial question of how this overwhelming public pressure was translated into governmental action. If businessmen were reluctant followers in the decisions for war and empire, who provided the impetus for these momentous steps? Writing in the 1930s, Julius Pratt offered several seminal interpretations. First, he credited scholars and publicists such as Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, and Columbia University professor John W.Burgess with instructing the American public in the merits of a “new manifest destiny.” Burgess and Strong assured Americans of the superiority of their Anglo-Saxon governmental institutions and Protestant Christianity and urged them to spread this superior civilization abroad. Mahan argued for a “large policy” featuring the construction of a great navy and an isthmian canal and the holding of key naval bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific for both strategic and commercial purposes. Therefore, when the American public

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sought an emotional, psychological release from the problems of the 1890s, they had before them a racial, religious, and strategic blueprint.17 To these domestically-produced prescriptions, subsequent historians have added the influence of the contemporary example of European imperialism and the assumption that imperialism was a requisite of the great power status to which the United States aspired.18 Other historians, writing contemporaneously with Pratt, agreed that an aroused public had driven McKinley and the Republican Party into war; however, these historians cited the sensational reporting of the American press as primarily responsible for focusing American sympathy on the plight of the Cuban people. Drawing on their own reporters and information provided by the Cuban junta in New York City, the “yellow press” had inundated readers with a flood of biased stories depicting Spanish cruelty and Cuban suffering. The American public’s intensely humanitarian response, when combined with its outrage over the sinking of the battleship Maine, dictated war.19 Pratt augmented these explanations by providing another ostensible point of linkage between the public outcry and the McKinley administration. Although Mahan was the principal popularizer of the “large policy,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge were the government officials most responsible for laying the “fruits of war” at the feet of this aroused public. Roosevelt and Lodge had adopted and advocated Mahan’s ideas, had anticipated that war with Spain would afford the opportunity for its consummation, and had helped manipulate a weak McKinley (who was “clay” in their “hands”) into the acquisition of empire. In sum, a skilled group of “large policy” conspirators had utilized their positions and the war brought on by a public convinced of its racial, humanitarian, and nationalistic mission to launch the nation on its imperial voyage.20 Regardless of the exact source of the stimulus, the concept of an overlyexcited public forcing war on a resistant political and business establishment became common staple by the 1950s. Ernest R.May cited the “feverish emotion” and “mass passion” that gripped the nation, while providing the most forceful depiction of still another linkage between popular opinion and government action: “Overshadowing all other factors…was the domestic political aspect of the Cuban problem.” May’s study culminated a long tradition of portraying McKinley as weak and politically expedient. His “duty to the Republican party was much clearer than his duty to the nation,” and he bowed to public opinion in order to avert the threat of Democratic victories in the mid-term congressional elections of November 1898.21 If then, as the cumulative “Pratt approach” contended, the US decision for war and empire had been unplanned and accidental, manipulated by a few conspirators, or the result of sincere (if misplaced or misguided) humanitarian concern, the nation was absolved of the selfish, calculated, and exploitive motives ascribed to it by the revisionists. The emphasis on idealistic and humanitarian objectives provided another alternative to the economic argument for explaining not only the onset of war

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and empire but also the essence of US foreign policy during the decade and a half after 1900. Pratt’s treatment of the “imperialism of righteousness” had again anticipated this new trend when he contended that “the missionary minded” among Protestant religious groups had argued effectively that the United States had a “moral and religious responsibility” to spread Christianity and uplift mankind in Cuba, the Philippines, and the world over. Concentrating particularly on Asia, the missionary movement experienced its “golden age” from 1900 to 1915. As a group, missionaries had much greater exposure to Asia than other Americans. They and the domestic religious establishment had the greatest influence over general American perceptions of the Far East, and, according to some historians, exercised considerable control over general policy formation.22 Although the missionary movement provides the most obvious example of humanitarian motives, scholars have not confined this argument to organized religion. They have asserted that the benign impulse to aid others characterized US policy in general, within both the insular empire and the Caribbean. By promoting sanitation, furthering education, building public works, maintaining order, and instituting democratic institutions, the United States sought to prepare these less developed countries for material prosperity and selfgovernance. Within this interpretive framework, presidents from McKinley through Wilson are seen as acting to extend “civilization” to others, as promoting “progressive” societies abroad, or as practicing “missionary imperialism.”23 Working from this reform dimension of US policy, other historians have suggested that American imperial actions abroad were natural extensions of the progressive movement for honesty, efficiency, and expanded opportunity at home.24 Historians seeking to refute the “sinister and sordid motives” associated with the economic interpretation have also accentuated strategic considerations. Focusing particularly on the Caribbean region, these writers make “continental security” the essence of policy: the United States acted to safeguard the isthmian canal route and to prevent European nations from securing bases or threatening the safety of the continental United States. Following the nation’s rapprochement with Great Britain at the turn of the century, both US civilian and military leaders feared German meddling in Latin America, and similar apprehensions over German intentions had prompted retention of the entire Philippine archipelago rather than a single coaling station. Maintaining the order and stability necessary to block European intrusions had required annexations, formal protectorates, administration of customs houses, military interventions and occupations, and the general suppression of revolutions. But these actions were undertaken reluctantly and for defensive purposes rather than to gratuitously dominate and exploit smaller, weaker nations. Termed by some “protective” or “preclusive imperialism,” such ostensibly defensive, non-economic behavior has led others to dismiss “North American imperialism” during these years as a “myth.”25

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Accomplishing such strategic objectives required power or the “tools of empire.” Foremost among these tools was the development of US military capacity and especially a modern navy. With increased strength came an enhanced institutional and professional role for the American military. From their positions on the Navy General Board and the Army General Staff, military leaders endorsed the antirevolutionary drive for order and stability in the Caribbean, favored the exclusion of Europeans from the western hemisphere, and sought additional resources and bases in the Far East. Significantly, historians have contended that these military spokesmen were motivated primarily by strategic concerns, and secondly by their desire to strengthen their own branches of the service.26 According to other historians, enhanced American naval power was part of the larger process of modernization by which the United States and Europe outstripped the rest of the world technologically. The resulting disparity in power, together with parallel differences in national coherence and purpose, undergirded empire. Making modernization the essential context, Richard H.Collin has portrayed a vibrant, materialistic, technologically advanced, conjoint, and Protestant United States confronting a less developed, comparatively inert, disparate, and Catholic Latin America. Against this background of cultural dissonance and of US strength and Latin weakness, both conflict and American predominance were virtually inevitable.27 This analysis represents “imperialism as an objective process due fundamentally to the unavoidable impact of advanced western civilization on the comparatively backward native cultures of the third world.” Objectivists also emphasize the necessity for advanced nations “to intervene…to impose order on chaotic conditions” and the interventions as “primarily a work of education and civilization.” 28 If the process is inexorable and progressive, then selfish national or political interests are minimized or excluded. Just as the economic analysis elicited stringent criticism, the “Pratt approach” has not gone unscathed. Students of American naval policy have discredited a central aspect of the “large policy” conspiracy by demonstrating that a group of navy officers, rather than Theodore Roosevelt, formulated the battle plan directing Admiral Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Drafted before Roosevelt took office as assistant secretary, the plan had been personally approved by President McKinley prior to its implementation.29 This portrayal of the president controlling strategic planning is part of the more recent depiction of McKinley as a masterful politician and adept manager of men who dominated his administration and its foreign policy. H.Wayne Morgan, Lewis L.Gould, and John L.Offner have argued convincingly that McKinley was neither manipulated by large policy conspirators nor overwhelmed by public pressure. Instead, he opted for war and empire based on a deliberate assessment of US interests. In the most recent and exhaustively researched of these volumes, Offner constructs a strong case for the influence of domestic political over economic considerations in McKinley’s thinking. But Offner’s McKinley is a much stronger, more competent, and reflective leader than the man presented by Ernest May.30

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Even with Offner’s meticulous reconstruction of the political and diplomatic context, definitively proving that the reticent McKinley acted principally from humanitarian or political motives remains only slightly less difficult than demonstrating his primary economic aims. Similarly, determining the true nature of “public opinion” at the turn of the century, and linking such sentiment to the actual formation of policy has proven most difficult. Who constituted the public? In the absence of Gallup polls, how can public opinion be gauged? Were editorial opinions synonymous with and representative of public opinion? Other scholars have questioned the influence of intellectuals and publicists. Men such as Strong and Mahan, according to James A.Field, Jr, were more concerned with internal problems or strategic defense than with aggressive expansion or imperialism, and their decisive impact on American public perceptions remains unsubstantiated.31 More generally, the analytical approach of finding exceptions to the economic argument or comparing “rhetoric” to “reality” might also be applied to the humanitarian or strategic reasoning. For example, even the most ardent practitioners of the Pratt approach are embarrassed by Theodore Roosevelt’s high-handed treatment of Colombia and his expedient response to the Panama “revolution”; nor were the fixing of elections in Nicaragua and Santo Domingo or the violent military rule of Haiti consistent with democratic doctrine. Similarly, Melvin Small has questioned the widely held view that Germany constituted a military and strategic threat in the Caribbean after 1903.32 If the reality were not so menacing, then the rhetoric of contemporaries and those historians who justified US interventions in the Caribbean or Mexico must also be challenged. Such “exceptions” or discrepancies between rhetoric and reality raise the larger issue of American “innocence.” Can such innocence and alleged devotion to principle and self-defense be reconciled with the uncanny promotion of US material interests by humanitarian and strategic policies?33 And can the innocent and aberrant nature of US policy from 1890 to 1916 be sustained other than by narrowly defining imperialism and by ignoring the continuity of an acquisitive, domineering policy toward Mexicans, Indians, and other nonwhites? DEVELOPMENT AND DEPENDENCY Such questions demand an assessment of the impact of American imperialism on other nations and peoples. Generally, but not exclusively, those scholars working within the conceptual boundaries of the Pratt approach have positively evaluated the outcomes of American policies. They emphasize that the United States undertook imperialism with an “uneasy conscience” and a commitment to prepare others for self-government. This commitment distinguished American imperialism from the European variety and operated as a “safety valve” protecting the United States from “some of the temptations —to abuse, to disillusionment, and to cynicism—of its great power.” As the requisite first step to imparting respect for democratic processes, the United States imposed

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order and stability on the Philippines and the Caribbean. By subduing chronic banditry and suppressing revolution, Americans reduced the persistent violence in these societies and rescued them from the threat of European intervention.34 According to these historians, this greater domestic tranquility facilitated other positive achievements. American control in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines improved public sanitation, eradicated disease, extended education, and transformed public facilities. The enhanced political and social order also attracted foreign investments for economic development, at least a portion of which trickled down to the general population. While acknowledging that US policies had kept some unpopular governments in power, that the lessons in selfgovernment had not always been learned well, or that development had not brought general prosperity, these scholars concluded that “by the comparative standard, the United States had no reason to apologize for its record.”35 Other students of US policy in the Philippines and Caribbean have been less complimentary, arguing that the costs of the US quest for order and stability have been far too high. Suppressing the Philippine revolution between 1899 and 1902 resulted in eighteen thousand Filipino battle casualties and contributed to at least another hundred thousand deaths from disease and starvation. Other interventions led to several hundred Mexican and more than two thousand Haitian deaths. Critics have also attributed deleterious social and economic developments to these military occupations. Louis A. Pérez, Jr argues convincingly that US intervention against Spain stifled the social portion of the Cuban revolution that had called for the distribution of land to the dispossessed. Similarly, the American military has been credited with extending discriminatory racial codes and opposing labor organization in areas under its control.36 This conservative bent has also been detected in the political realm where the order imposed by the United States repeatedly produced or sustained elitist, usually autocratic, domination rather than effectively promoting the adoption of democratic institutions. American-trained and armed national guards provided the bases for decades-long dictatorships, and catering to American wishes became more crucial than public service to successful office holding. Corruption and narrow personal and upper-class self-interest, in the absence of clear domestic accountability, too often characterized these distorted polities. Those emphasizing the negative aspects of US control have vigorously disputed the contention that an American presence benefitted smaller nations economically. They argue that increased US and foreign investment, better roads and ports, enhanced technology, greater productivity, and expanded exports failed to improve the standard of living for the great majority of Filipino, Caribbean, or central American peasants and workers. Instead, these countries developed export economies focused on agricultural or extractive products that were often controlled by foreign owners or local elites and were especially vulnerable to international economic forces. The poor repeatedly lost small, food-producing farms to large haciendas and were left as migrant workers subject to seasonal unemployment. The experience of Puerto Rico

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provides perhaps the most telling refutation of the “exaggerated claims” for the benign influence of US administration and economic presence. Despite orderly, honest, efficient government imposed by the United States, despite significant private investment in sugar, tobacco, and public utilities, and despite greatly expanded exports, the overall standard of living remained static between 1898 and 1930. As Daniel R.Headrick has perceptively noted, “growth” and “development” are not synonymous. The latter requires investment in human rather than physical capital—a process that seldom occurred under the imperial mantle.37 Dependency theory has provided one of the most provocative attempts to explain the developmental experience of smaller, poorer countries. In essence, this complex body of thought contends that the development and prosperity of the industrialized, technologically sophisticated “metropolitan” nations and the agrarian, non-industrialized, and poor “peripheral” countries have been incompatible. Using their wealth and technology, their control of markets, and their military might, metropolitan nations have forced the periphery to supply raw materials and consume foreign-produced industrial goods. According to dependency theorists, this relationship compels the poor countries to concentrate on a few exportable products, and leaves them with little control over economic decisions and with severely limited capacity to industrialize and enhance national welfare. Real power resides with the metropolitan nations: they determine the terms of trade and, together with local elites, derive the profits from the system.38 Dependency theory has evoked spirited rejoinders. Dissenters assert that this analysis gives insufficient weight to local conditions, such as the colonial history of elite rule, neglect of education, or lack of physical and human resources for industrialization in Latin America. Others complain that dependencestas fail to devote proper attention to non-pecuniary ideologies or to account for different rates of development among third-world countries.39 Given these and other criticisms, dependency theory fails to demonstrate direct US responsibility for all the ills of its client states, but this analytical shortcoming does not refute the theory’s accurate description of dismal conditions in the Philippines or Latin America. While dependency theory has addressed the imperial relationship in economic terms, the concept of “cultural imperialism” encompasses ideas and beliefs. Once more differences over definition abound. Some scholars believe that the process must be forcefully imposed and promote political or economic ends. Others reject this “functional” approach for a “structural” theory that accentuates the discrepancy in power between two societies and the ability of the stronger one to provide the teachers and to define topics (ranging from religion to technology) worthy of study. The latter approach coincides most closely with the broad working definition of imperialism adopted earlier in this essay. Regardless of definition, the concept of cultural imperialism facilitates an examination of the roles of often-overlooked “nonstate actors” such as missionaries, teachers, and medical personnel in US

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foreign relations and promotes a more inclusive assessment of the impact of US presence abroad.40 In the broadest sense, American insistence that others should adopt democratic and capitalistic institutions has been “profoundly imperialistic.”41 By pressuring Cubans to eschew political violence or Filipinos to prepare for self-government based on a US model, the United States demanded that these countries remake their societies according to American values. Clearly, the “reforms” aimed at stabilizing economies, or instituting honest, efficient, representative governments, or promoting improved sanitation or medical practices embodied a critical cultural dimension. To effect changes in any of these societal or political areas required alterations of cultural beliefs and practices. Missionaries were the most prominent group of non-state actors propagating American cultural beliefs abroad from 1890 through 1916. Indeed, this era has been characterized as the most aggressive in American missionary history. Phrasing their goals in a language of conquest, missionaries went to China and the Philippines not as “passive cultural intermediaries” but as “conscious agents of change, of radical transformation. They came to Asia to do something to Asia and Asians.” Missionaries sought to impose religious codes that they deemed to be superior; they also labored tirelessly on educational and medical projects.42 Education obviously provided a mechanism for disseminating western values and technology, but historians have also included western medicine among the “tools of empire.” On an immediate and practical level, Americans instituted measures for improved sanitation to protect their administrators and soldiers in Cuba, Mexico, or the Philippines and to help prevent the spread of disease from the Caribbean to the mainland. But Americans also viewed medicine as a “superior form of propaganda for the benefits of western civilization and capitalism.” Missionaries perceived medicine as a way to do good while at the same time making contacts with and acquiring influence over indigenous populations. Medicine, contends David Arnold, was a “celebration of empire itself,” since it often involved massive exercises in state and military intervention and the reordering of indigenous societies along western lines.43 If US imperialism produced mixed economic results, what was the cultural impact? Historians once referred to tremendously “constructive activities” and “useful reforms and achievements” in the Philippines and other areas under American control.44 More recent scholarship either questions the positive effects of the American presence or suggests that the impact has been exaggerated—both negatively and positively. Virtually all historians agree that efforts to transplant US political institutions were largely futile. Even if client states adopted an ostensibly representative government, they were invariably plagued by dictatorships, elite domination, politically related violence, inefficiency and corruption. In short, patterns that existed prior to US control persisted. The same was often true in education or medicine. For example, US

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efforts to promote education in the Philippines were well intentioned and aided tens of thousands of Filipinos, but by 1913 the average child spent only two years in school and the overall literacy rate had not improved. Similarly, the US occupation of Vera Cruz in 1915 produced a startling medical and sanitary transformation of the city into a much cleaner and healthier place; soon after the US departure, all had returned to “normal.” Finally, missionaries in the Philippines and China contributed to a spirit of individualism promoting democracy in the former and revolution in the latter. The missionaries in China also furthered education and medical innovations on a scale similar to that in the Philippines, but they converted few Chinese to Christianity. Again, the native culture was tenaciously resistant to change. A.E.Campbell’s observation concerning political transference seems more generally applicable: “They [subject peoples] cannot be made more civilized, and therefore fitter for self-government, if civilization is defined in alien terms.”45 Both dependency theory and cultural imperialism raise the issue of collaboration between Americans and the people they sought to control. This, like the impact of the US presence more generally, has been a relatively neglected topic. But, as European scholars have emphasized, collaboration was an essential component of the imperial process. From the European and American perspective, it was directly related to the cost of empire. Without indigenous collaborators, the administration of either colonies or informal empire would have been prohibitive. Discerning the motives of local collaborators has proven more difficult. Politicians often cooperated with the United States or solicited US aid or intervention as a means of gaining or retaining control of their governments. Merchants who were well placed usually profited from US trade and investment. Elites in Cuba or the Philippines understood the US tendency to block revolution and thereby preserve their social and economic positions. Still, narrow self-interest was not the only motive for collaboration. Many politicians, merchants, or aristocrats also considered US political institutions, economic practices, and technology as the most viable route to modernization and general prosperity. Therefore, elite collaborators were often complex figures who pursued national as well as personal goals within severely constricted choices. For the masses in Cuba or the Philippines the reality of American power and the futility of resistance were probably more responsible for their acquiescence, if not active collaboration.46 IMPERIALISM, AMERICAN STYLE What conclusions emerge from this welter of interpretations? First, the United States was neither so exceptional nor so innocent as scholars once contended. Like their European contemporaries, Americans possessed and employed superior power to control others. After all the justifications have been stripped away, the essential process remains one of “Big Dog eats Little Dog.”47 Second,

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the economic, social, and political dislocation of the 1890s provided an essential backdrop for a more assertive foreign policy, but American imperialism was not the result of conspiracy, mass irrationality, incompetent leadership, or national absent-mindedness. McKinley, Roosevelt, and Wilson were competent leaders who dominated their foreign policies and acted from considered assessments of national and international interests. When evaluated from the perspective of long-term ideological and policy patterns, the events of the 1890s were neither an accident nor an aberration. American imperialism followed logically from a heritage of continental expansion at the expense of Mexicans and Indians and from an ideology that had long emphasized the inequality of races and the superiority of white AngloSaxons, had linked US expansion to a “mission” extending liberty to others, and had made economic growth central to obtaining national greatness.48 The campaign after 1890 for a liberal world order featuring democratic institutions and capitalism was built on solid foundations. Regardless of the specific motive or objective—whether economic expansion, strategic security, democratic reform, cultural uplift, or religious conversion—those who made policy in the United States, and those who attempted to influence it, invariably sought order and stability and opposed all revolutionary change they felt unable to control. Indeed, the pursuit of order and stability and a predictable international environment open to American ideals and interests provided the principal operational theme for US policy from 1890 through 1916. Turn-of-the-century Americans were not, however, completely cynical and selfish. Although variously interested in national welfare and personal and economic fulfillment and certainly ethnocentric and patronizing toward their supposed “inferiors,” Americans sincerely believed that US imperialism would benefit those being controlled. And the various motives for American imperialism reinforced one another; they were not mutually exclusive. National aggrandizement and altruistic motives coexisted quite comfortably with one another; economic, strategic, racial, philosophical, and religious influences fused imperialism and idealism.49 Still, any assessment of American imperialism must not divorce even the most benign motives from their impact abroad. The effects of American policies have received much less scholarly consideration than the domestic roots of imperialism, and greater attention needs to be devoted to the role of the periphery and collaboration within the American empire. Interestingly, the desire to prepare others for self-government and the conviction that these clients should follow the developmental example of the United States has persuaded many observers that their policies were less exploitive than those of the Europeans; but these objectives simultaneously rendered Americans more imperialistic, not less, because they were more ambitious in their insistence upon instituting more fundamental changes in indigenous societies. Moreover, the claims for the benefits of American control must not be overstated. Order was imposed; education was promoted; sanitation and medical care were improved; roads, railroads, and ports were constructed; private capital was

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infused; productivity was enhanced. But such reforms usually proved transitory and did little to improve the lot of the majority of local inhabitants. Neither democratic institutions nor true economic development and general prosperity proved exportable to the Caribbean or the Philippines. This failure resulted in part from the tenacity of indigenous cultural, political, and economic forces. But the US presence also contributed to the deaths of thousands of Filipinos and Latin Americans, to elite-controlled and dictatorial politics, and to static or declining economic conditions for the masses. Only by ignoring such outcomes and the coercion involved or by attempting to narrowly define US imperialism out of existence can the image of American innocence and the fundamental uniqueness of imperialism, American style be sustained. NOTES 1

Joseph A.Fry, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power,” in Howard Jones (ed.), Safeguarding the Republic: Essays and Documents in American Foreign Relations, 1890–1991, New York, 1992, pp. 26–7; Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900, New York, 1968, p. 162. 2 Edward P.Crapol, “Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography of LateNineteenth Century American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 573–97; Robin W.Winks, “The American Struggle with ‘Imperialism’: How Words Frighten,” in Rob Kroes (ed.), The American Identity: Fusion and Fragmentation, Amsterdam, 1980, pp. 143–77. 3 Schumpeter quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” in John K.Fairbank (ed.), The Missionary Enterprise in China, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, p. 336; Waller quoted in David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, New York, 1970, p. xiii. 4 Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, New York, 1950, p. 468; Dexter Perkins, The American Approach to Foreign Policy, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, pp. 30–4,41–7; Ernest R.May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay, 1968; rept, Chicago, 1991, pp. xxx, 3, 14–16. 5 William A.Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York, 1972, pp. 47, 50–1, 55. See also: Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, Ithaca, N.Y., 1963; Thomas J.McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901, Chicago, 1967. 6 Wolfgang J.Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, Boston, 1986, p. ix. 7 Graham quoted in Thomas G.Paterson and Stephen G.Rabe (eds), Imperial Surge: The United States Abroad. The 1890s-early 1900s, Lexington, Mass., 1992, p. xviii. 8 Williams, Tragedy; LaFeber, New Empire; McCormick, China Market; Crapol, “Coming to Terms.” 9 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York, 1984; Louis A.Pérez Jr, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy, Athens, Ga, 1990; Thomas D.Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System, Durham, N.C., 1991. 10 LaFeber, New Empire, p. 400. 11 Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916–32, Chicago, 1972, pp. 23–5; N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution, New York, 1968; Emily

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Joseph A.Fry S.Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, New York, 1982, pp. 7–13. Rosenberg, American Dream, pp. 38–86. Paul S.Holbo, “Economics, Emotion, and Expansion: An Emerging Foreign Policy,” in H.Wayne Morgan (ed.), The Gilded Age, Syracuse, N.Y., 1970, pp. 199–221; Julius W.Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands, 1936; rept, Chicago, 1964, p. 257; William H.Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921, Chicago, 1982, p. 184 (final quote). Becker, Dynamics; David M.Pletcher, “Rhetoric and Results: A Pragmatic View of American Economic Expansionism, 1865–1898,” Diplomatic History, vol. 5, 1981, pp. 93–105; Paul A.Varg, The Making of A Myth: The United States and China, 1897–1912, East Lansing, Mich., 1968, pp. 37–53; James A.Field Jr, “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review, vol. 83, 1978, p. 645. Richard Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” in Daniel Aaron (ed.), America in Crisis, New York, 1952, pp. 173–200; Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs, New York, 1983, p. 4; Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: America’s China Policy, 1895–1901, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, pp. 1–4. Robert E.Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century, Chicago, 1953, pp. 18, 27, 42; Norman A.Graebner, Ideas and Diplomacy: Readings in the Intellectual Tradition of American Foreign Policy, New York, 1964, p. 339. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898, pp. 1–22. May, American Imperialism, pp. 116–230; David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s, Madison, Wis., 1970, pp. 9–33. Joseph E.Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 1895–1898, New York, 1934. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898, pp. 242, 327. Ernest R.May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power, New York, 1961, pp. 82, 129, 143. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898, pp. 279, 282; James C.Thomson Jr, Peter W.Stanley, and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia, New York, 1981, pp. 45–56; James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915, Cambridge, Mass., 1983. Whitney T.Perkins, Denial of Empire: The United States and Its Dependencies, Leyden, 1962; Richard Collin, Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context, Baton Rouge, La, 1991; Richard H.Abrams, “United States Intervention Abroad, The First Quarter Century,” American Historical Review, vol. 79, 1974, pp. 72–102; Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy, Kent, Ohio, 1986. Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921, Pittsburgh, Pa, 1971; Howard E.Gillette Jr, “The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902: Workshop for American Progressivism,” American Quarterly, vol. 25, 1973, pp. 410–25. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States: A Historical Interpretation, New York, 1943, pp. 140, 166; Dana G.Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900–1921, Princeton, N.J., 1964, pp. 530–1; Lester D.Langley, The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900– 1934, Lexington, Ky, 1983, pp. 5–6, 8. Richard D.Challener, Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898–1914, Princeton, N.J., 1973, pp. 406–12; Kenneth J.Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power, New York, 1991, pp. 228–47.

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Winks, “American Struggle,” p. 144; Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, New York, 1967, pp. 54–5; Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism, Baton Rouge, La, 1985, pp. 8,103,198; Collin, Roosevelt’s Caribbean, pp. 9–11,547. Wolfgang J.Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, New York, 1982, pp. 76, 78. John A.S.Grenville and George Berkeley Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873–1917, New Haven, Conn., 1966, pp. 269–76. H.Wayne Morgan, America’s Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion, New York, 1965; Lewis L.Gould, The Spanish-American War and President McKinley, Lawrence, Kan., 1982; John L.Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992. Field, “American Imperialism,” pp. 646–50. Melvin Small, “The United States and the German ‘Threat’ to the Hemisphere, 1904–1914,” The Americas, vol. 28, 1972, pp. 252–70; David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917, Madison, Wis., 1988, p. 289. For American innocence, see Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903, New Haven, Conn., 1982, pp. 253–68. D.Perkins, American Approach, p. 31; W.Perkins, Denial of Empire, pp. 343, 351; Munro, Dollar Diplomacy, pp. 534–43. D.Perkins, American Approach, p. 47. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, pp. 80–3, 97, 105–10, 117, 161; Schoonover, United States in Central America, p. 111; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902–1915, Baton Rouge, La, 1988, p. 124. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, pp. 5–78; Healy, Drive to Hegemony, pp. 260–74; Glenn A.May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913, Westport, Conn., 1980, pp. 142– 3, 146, 150, 166, 175; Daniel R.Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technological Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, New York, 1988, pp. 383–4. Christobal Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Under development, New York, 1989; Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, pp. 121–37; Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain and the LateIndustrializing World since 1815, New York, 1981, pp. 59–84. Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism. Schlesinger, “Missionary Enterprise,” pp. 363–5; Paul W.Harris, “Cultural Imperialism and American Protestant Missionaries: Collaboration and Dependency in Mid-Nineteenth Century China,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 60, 1991, pp. 311–15. W.Perkins, Denial of Empire, p. 342. Thomson, et al., Sentimental Imperialists, p. 45; Kenton J.Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898–1916: An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality, Urbana, III., 1986; Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, New Haven, Conn., 1984. David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, 1988, pp. 2, 10, 14–19. Julius W.Pratt, America’s Colonial Experiment: How the United States Gained, Governed, and In Part Gave Away a Colonial Empire, 1950; rept, Gloucester, Mass., 1964, p. 201; W.Perkins, Denial of Empire, p. 208. Peter W.Stanley (ed.), Reappraising an Empire: New Perspectives on PhilippineAmerican History, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, pp. 1–7; May, Social Engineering, p.

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123; Robert E.Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Vera Cruz, Lexington, Ky, 1962, pp. 123–54, 170–1; A.E.Campbell, “The Paradox of Imperialism: The American Case,” in Mommsen and Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After, p. 37. 46 All the articles in Stanley, Reappraising an Empire, address this theme, as does the Pacific Historical Review, vol. 68, 1979, pp. 467–591, entitled “American Empire, 1898–1903”; Peter W.Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921, Cambridge, Mass., 1974, pp. 52, 268–75; Glenn A.May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War, New Haven, Conn., 1991, pp. 198–201; Pérez, United States and Cuba, pp. 113–17; Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924, New York, 1982. 47 Friedrich W.Horlacher, “The Language of Late Nineteenth-Century American Expansionism,” in Serge Ricard (ed.), An American Empire: Expansionist Cultures and Policies, 1881–1917, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p. 40. 48 Michael H.Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven, Conn., 1987; Albert K.Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History, 1935; rept, Chicago, 1963. 49 David L.Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861– 1898, Bloomington, Ind., 1985, pp. 2, 191; on the synthesis of motives, see also Robert L.Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2nd rev. ed., Arlington Heights, III., 1986.

5

Wilsonian diplomacy in war and peace John W.Coogan

President Woodrow Wilson left office in March 1921, a crippled, embittered man. His years in the White House had dramatically and permanently changed the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. The actions of his administration, his motives, and the consequences of the changes he produced were a source of controversy from 1913 to 1921. Controversy has been a key element of the historical scholarship concerning his era ever since. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this debate has been its range, as scholars have failed to agree on even the most basic points. Charles Seymour,1 Charles Tansill,2 Thomas Bailey,3 George Kennan,4 and other first-generation Wilson historians produced many volumes and great heat, but little consensus. Instead, they seemed to write about different Woodrow Wilsons: an impartial defender of American neutrality; an economically-driven dupe of the Allies and the house of Morgan; a martyred prophet of world peace; an unworldly idealist ignorant and contemptuous of the realities of power.5 Nor did this historical confusion end in 1951. In 1953 Robert Osgood published a long, well documented book arguing that Wilson was an idealist who paid little attention to balance of power considerations;6 two years later Edward Buehrig published a long, equally well documented book arguing that Wilson was a realist whose policies were dominated by concern to maintain the balance of power.7 The 1960s saw Arthur Link’s multivolume analysis of Wilson’s “higher realism”8 as well as N. Gordon Levin, Jr’s picture of an ideologically driven anti-Junker, anti-Bolshevik “liberal-capitalist.” 9 In the next decade Link reemphasized the pervasive impact of Wilson’s Christianity,10 while David Trask described him as “a disciple of Clausewitz.”11 More recent scholarship has seen Wilson portrayed by Lloyd Gardner as a crusader against revolutionary nationalism,12 as a willing tool of an aggressively expansionist business community by Sidney Bell,13 and as a “liberal internationalist” by Lloyd Ambrosius.14 The number of labels used to describe Wilson and his foreign policies over the past seventy years approximates the number of scholars who have written on the topic. 71

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What has been missing is any significant integration of these disparate, often directly contradictory, interpretations. Historians have been so busy trying to prove that Wilson was a “realist” or an “idealist,” a “progressive” or an “imperialist,” a “liberal-capitalist” or a “liberal internationalist,” a disciple of Christ or of Clausewitz, that they have missed one basic point: Wilson was all of those things, but none of them exclusively. Each scholar has identified and documented a legitimate aspect of the foreign policy of the Wilson administration, but only by ignoring or twisting lines of equally valid evidence that point in different directions. The historical Woodrow Wilson, as distinguished from the one who appears in much of the historical literature, simply defies one-dimensional (e.g., “realist”) or even two-dimensional (e.g., “liberal-capitalist”) labels. He was a man of genius, of enormous inner complexity, of self-contradiction and, ultimately, with the capacity for self-destruction. He had to define and implement his foreign policies in a complex world in which the lives of millions of people depended on his decisions. As a result, he tended to be more concerned with consequences than with ideological or political consistency. Thus he could, simultaneously, be a disciple of Christ, as Link has maintained, and a disciple of Clausewitz, as Trask has argued. In the name of world peace he waged a world war; in the name of self-determination he ordered American troops into Latin America and Russia; in the name of western civilization he failed to provide food for starving German and Austrian children after the armistice of November 1918. He saw neither contradiction nor hypocrisy in these positions. Any attempt to find one label to describe his foreign policies inevitably falls short because he did not have one dominant, consistent motive and because his actions and statements often contradicted each other. Any attempt to find one label to describe the foreign policies of his administration inevitably falls short because he often failed to control the agents who claimed to act in his name or even to explain his ideas to them. An understanding of American foreign relations during the Wilson era must begin with an acceptance of these complexities and contradictions. As a tenured professor at Princeton, Wilson—like the scholars who write about him—enjoyed the luxury of engaging in leisurely research and reflecting on his thoughts before he committed himself to publication. As president of the United States he depended on subordinates to do the research, and many of his most important decisions had to be made under intense pressure and rigid deadlines. While he certainly maintained long-standing, deeply-held principles such as respect for democracy and self-determination, he constantly had to integrate such abstractions with complicated, interrelated considerations of politics, economics, diplomacy, bureaucracy and personality. As a result, his policies were more ad hoc and less calculated than present scholarship acknowledges. A second point to keep in mind is that Edwin Weinstein’s brilliant work on Wilson’s physical and mental health has forever changed the ground on which

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any understanding of the president’s personal role must be based.15 Wilson hardly was a disembodied intellect even before his stroke in October 1919: he was a human being who battled physical and emotional illness throughout his presidency—illness that grew gradually more severe and influenced both personal and policy decisions. His major stroke must be seen as the culmination of these problems, not as a sudden trauma that transformed overnight a previously healthy, absolutely rational man into the pitiful shell of one that he became in his last seventeen months in office. The third point which must be understood is that “Woodrow Wilson” and “Wilson administration foreign policy” were not synonymous. Wilson himself acknowledged on his inauguration day that his primary interests were domestic and that it would be an “irony of fate” if he had to become deeply involved in the management of foreign affairs.16 Yet if he came into office with little interest in events overseas, they quickly forced him to reassess his priorities. The Mexican revolution and a series of upheavals in the Caribbean drew the United States into political, economic, and occasionally military intervention in Latin America despite the president’s deeply held and sincerely stated commitment to the principle of self-determination. Japanese imperialism at the expense of China and the festering imperial sore of the Philippines led to erratic but ongoing presidential concern about the Far East. Above all, World War I led him to believe that his program of domestic reform could be implemented only in a new international environment, one that could be created only by active American leadership of the world in war and peace. Wilson, in spite of these pressures, mastered foreign relations as quickly as any president in American history, on a level of understanding matched only by the most sophisticated of his predecessors. The style that emerged was highly personal, and as brilliant and erratic as the president himself. This personalization of policy became particularly important because Wilson was never able to devise an effective mechanism to communicate his ideas and decisions to those who were institutionally responsible for implementing them. He never trusted his State Department. Wilson considered his first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, a political necessity but an intellectual and diplomatic embarrassment.17 The president made no attempt to build a competent foreign relations establishment. Instead he bypassed the department and, on important issues, operated through private agents—the most important of whom was Colonel Edward House. As a result, the State Department often found itself acting in utter ignorance of major presidential initiatives in its contacts with foreign governments.18 Bryan resigned in despair after two years and his successor, Robert Lansing, proved to be a better administrator but no more able to secure the confidence of his boss. Wilson considered his second secretary of state a narrow-minded lawyer who became bogged down in technicalities and unable to understand any larger vision of international relations. The president continued to ignore or even deliberately mislead his own State Department.

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Lansing lasted five frustrating years before being fired in 1920.19 Bainbridge Colby, Wilson’s last secretary of state, could do little more than hold the department together through a year when the White House could not lead but would not delegate. This weakness at the State Department compounded the abysmal quality of Wilson’s diplomatic appointments. The president himself characterized his ambassador to Germany as an “ass” and an “idiot,” but chose to leave James Gerard as chief American representative in Berlin until 1917. 20 The ambassador to Britain was actively disloyal, not only to his president’s instructions but to his country, to the point where he helped the Foreign Office draft its reply to a protest from his own government. Yet Walter Hines Page remained accredited to London until his health failed in 1918. 21 The president did recall his governor general from the Philippines, but only upon receiving evidence that Francis Burton Harrison ran Manila in the manner of Henry VIII, impregnating two teenage sisters and inducing nationalist leaders to pimp for him. 22 Scholars have attempted to blame such disastrous appointments on Bryan, but they were—including the appointment of Bryan himself—the president’s responsibility. Wilson simply did not care enough about his State Department or his formal representation abroad to secure competent men to staff those positions.23 As a consequence, the United States from 1913 to 1921 often found itself communicating to other nations in multiple voices. One classic case in October 1914 saw the British government try to make sense of five contradictory explanations of American policy toward Allied interference with neutral commerce: the president’s own conversation with the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice; House’s statements to Spring Rice, which were supposedly approved by Wilson; Bryan’s statements to Spring Rice, which were supposedly approved by Wilson; Lansing’s statements to Spring Rice, which were supposedly approved by Wilson; and Page’s statements to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey—which, once again, supposedly represented Wilson’s own views.24 In the midst of such chaos, even the most straightforward diplomatic communication would leave the British government mystified and frustrated. It also goes far to explain why historians have continued for seventy years to publish such diverse and even contradictory interpretations of the foreign policies of the Wilson administration: because the institutional chaos that produced those policies generated evidence to support just about any interpretation of administration actions or motives. What then would constitute an interpretation of “Wilsonian diplomacy in war and peace” which took into account Wilson’s genius, his lack of preparation in foreign affairs, his personal ad hoc style of policymaking, his physical and psychological condition, and his contempt for the State Department and diplomatic corps? While any answers must be tentative, some assessments are possible. Both Wilson and his administration clearly ranked the regions and the races of the world in a hierarchical way. Europe was more important than Latin

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America, which was more important than East Asia, which was more important than Africa; Anglo-Saxons were superior to other white races, which were superior to yellow, which were superior to brown, which were superior to black. Wilson might or might not like David Lloyd George or Georges Clemenceau or Prince Max of Baden on a personal level, but their nationality and race gave them an inherent credibility in his eyes that was automatically denied to Victoriano Huerta or Ho Chi Minh. These hierarchies helped to determine many Wilson administration policies. The principle of non-intervention in Latin America was important to the president, but adhering to such an abstraction did not prevent him from applying economic, diplomatic and military pressures to destabilize the Huerta government in Mexico City. Nor did it prevent Wilson from first supporting Pancho Villa’s revolt and then sending troops into northern Mexico to suppress it after the Villistas rejected his tutelage. In the same spirit, he lamented the need to intervene in the internal affairs of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Nicaragua—but he intervened anyway, justifying his actions by citing American national security and his self-proclaimed obligation to “teach the South American Republics to elect good men.”25 Wilson’s Latin American policy began in 1913 with noble words about selfdetermination, but after years of being filtered through the racism and paternalism of the administration, and after being compared with the needs of American national security interests, those words had a hollow ring by 1921— a ring punctuated by the tramp of American combat boots. Many of the same themes appear in American relations with East Asia, although the distance involved and other priorities generally limited the willingness of the administration to use military force. Wilson, in 1913, had spoken vaguely in favor of independence for the Philippines, though he clearly lacked Bryan’s personal commitment to it. By the time Filipino nationalist leaders began to demand that the administration’s actions match its rhetoric, Bryan had resigned. The president continued to claim that he sympathized with the Filipinos, but insisted that he was unable to implement independence because of the war in Europe. The Jones Act of 1916 promised independence but set no date for it. When the war ended, Wilson refused to move toward independence because of the Paris Peace Conference; when the conference ended, he refused to move toward independence until the Senate had approved the Treaty of Versailles. The Philippines remained an American colony when Wilson left office. While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his pro-independence rhetoric, the failure to make more progress in eight years demonstrates that he gave its implementation a low priority.26 Much the same can be said of Wilson’s support for the Chinese revolution. In principle, he supported democracy and self-determination for China; in practice, he maintained the unequal treaties which gave the United States special rights at China’s expense. When Japan presented the Chinese government with the “21 Demands” in 1915, seeking to take advantage of the preoccupation of the warring European powers to establish predominance, Wilson supported the

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efforts of his envoy in Beijing, Paul Reinsch, to encourage Chinese resistance. Bryan issued a formal statement, shortly before his resignation, that the United States would not recognize any Sino-Japanese agreement that compromised American treaty rights or Chinese integrity. When Beijing asked what practical support the United States would give, however, the administration made clear its unwillingness to consider economic or military sanctions. The Chinese then made the best deal they could with Tokyo, a deal Washington informally recognized two years later in the Lansing-Ishii agreement. Wilson went to Paris in 1919 pledged to uphold the principle of selfdetermination, but ended up agreeing that the former German concessions in China should be transferred to Japan rather than returned to China. His rhetoric of international equality had raised hope throughout China, particularly among young intellectuals. The dashing of that hope in the Versailles Treaty led directly to the outpouring of outraged nationalist fervor which exploded into the 4 May Movement, which was central to the origins of the national revival led by Sun Yatsen. Ironically, Wilson’s failure to uphold his own principles at Versailles proved to be his only lasting contribution to the rise of modern China.27 If the gap between Wilson’s rhetorical support for self-determination and his practical accommodation with Japanese imperialism infuriated the Chinese, it failed to win the United States many friends in Tokyo either. The administration’s pattern of publicly challenging Japanese actions then backing down and accepting them was hardly likely to earn respect. The ambiguous American role in the Allied military intervention in Siberia only confirmed this pattern. Perhaps Wilson himself knew whether he sent American troops to Vladivostok to maintain order and protect refugees, to meddle in the Russian Civil War, or to keep an eye on the much larger Japanese contingent. From the point of view of Tokyo, however, Washington’s motives were less significant than the very presence of American troops in Northeast Asia. Continued discrimination against Japanese in California, which the president claimed was a matter of state law and thus beyond his federal authority, and his personal opposition to Japanese attempts to add a racial equality clause to the Versailles Treaty further poisoned Japanese-American relations.28 Wilson saw few attractive options for American policy in the Far East. He believed, sincerely, in the principles of self-determination and selfgovernment. Yet he also believed, with equal sincerity, that the Philippines were not ready for self-government and that immediate independence would quickly lead to anarchy. He believed that China too was not yet ready for full national sovereignty, and that the unequal treaty structure would have to be dissolved gradually. He feared that Japanese imperialism would undermine China’s progress toward national responsibility, and that it would injure American economic and missionary interests there. Yet Wilson also understood that the American people would not permit him to use military power, or even meaningful economic pressure, to oppose Japan; and although he believed in the principle of Russian autonomy, he also believed that the

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United States had a responsibility to protect Siberia from anti-democratic Bolsheviks at home and imperialistic Japanese abroad. His administration tried for eight years to balance these different principles, interests, and responsibilities. By the time Wilson left office, he had disappointed Filipino nationalists, infuriated Chinese nationalists, irritated Japanese nationalists, used American troops to shoot Russian nationalists on Russian soil—and generated several volumes of presidential speeches supporting nationalism and democracy in East Asia. The major reason why the Wilson administration refused to become more deeply involved in the Far East and in Latin America was the European war that began in August 1914. First as leader of the world’s most powerful neutral, then as a belligerent and as a peace-maker, and finally as a politician unable to win domestic support for his peace program, Wilson led the United States to play a central role in World War I. His map of the world was firmly centered in Europe. His definitions of culture, civilization and politics were centered in Europe—especially in his romantic view of English history and institutions. He understood that American overseas trade was primarily with Europe. He believed that the future of the United States was linked to that of Europe in a way it never could be linked to Asia, Africa, or even Latin America. He believed the United States had both a deep moral responsibility and a vital national interest to save Europe from self-destruction and to help rebuild it on a healthy, democratic foundation. Wilson’s decision to regard relations with Europe as his highest priority in foreign affairs has been reflected in the work of historians. The nature of American neutrality and the motives behind the declaration of war in April 1917 remain extremely controversial. Efforts to make peace both before and after the armistice on 11 November 1918 have sparked a similar degree of controversy. Intervention in the Russian Civil War remains among the most mystifying events in all of American history, while the Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty has become the classic case of legislative/executive rivalry in US foreign relations. Simply to list the major scholarly works on these topics would expand this essay far beyond reasonable limits. The debate over the nature of Wilson’s neutrality policy has tended to follow the outlines of positions originally staked out between August 1914 and April 1917. Some critics, the most notable of whom was Theodore Roosevelt, complained that the administration was too neutral, that it gave too much importance to the technicalities of international law and too little to the realities of national interest. Supporters of the Allies repeatedly criticized Wilson for violating neutrality in favor of the Central Powers; supporters of the latter criticized him with equal intensity for violating neutrality in favor of the Allies. The president often cited these attacks from partisans of both sides as the best possible evidence that he was, in fact, maintaining a rigorous neutrality. The historical debate has focused on two questions: was the administration neutral, and should it have been? Those who argue that it was not neutral also

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tend to conclude that the United States favored the Allies at the expense of the Central Powers, and that a genuinely neutral position would have been in the American interest.29 Those who maintain that the administration was neutral, on the other hand, are split into those who consider this to have been a wise policy30 and those who believe that earlier and more generous support for the Allies would have worked to the benefit of the United States.31 The question of whether the American government was in fact neutral has been debated endlessly, with little resulting agreement. Those who argue that it was tend to emphasize Wilson’s own statements, public and private, imploring others to remain neutral and promising that his administration would uphold the standards of neutrality. Those who argue that the United States was not neutral tend to emphasize that American trade and finance went overwhelmingly to the Allies rather than to the Central Powers and thus favored one belligerent camp at the expense of the other. Both positions are well documented, since there is ample evidence to demonstrate that Wilson did sincerely wish to remain neutral at least until early 1917, and simultaneously, that one-sided access to American economic resources did become a vital element in the ability of the Allies to carry on the war. Unfortunately, this debate has been largely about semantics rather than the substance of American neutrality. Only Wilson’s most embittered critics have doubted that he sincerely intended to be neutral; the president himself admitted that the effect of America’s unbalanced trade patterns was to favor the Allies. Yet the first of these interpretations reduces neutrality to a matter of intent, while the second makes it a matter of effect. Neither intent nor effect was central to the definition of neutrality that existed in international relations in 1914. “Neutrality” was a status which a nation maintained by behaving in a certain manner toward belligerents and toward other neutrals. The rights and duties that constituted appropriate patterns of behavior had been established over more than a century of American history, in state papers and in court decisions. They had been collected by John Bassett Moore, the dean of American international lawyers, and published by the US Government Printing Office in 1906.32 The overwhelming majority of scholars who have written about the period 1914–17 have confused the question of whether the administration was impartial—which is indeed a matter of intent and effect— with the question of whether it was neutral— which is a matter of law. Once this semantic confusion is clarified, it becomes much easier to understand American policies during this period. It is clear that Wilson himself was not impartial in the attitude he took to the war: he favored the Allies, he hoped they would win and, aside from Bryan, his senior advisers on foreign policy (particularly House, Lansing, and Page) shared his bias.33 This attitude undoubtedly violated the standard set in the president’s message to the Senate of 19 August 1914, in which he urged Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.”34 But it did not violate neutrality, which is determined by actions and not by private thoughts. The evidence is also clear that Wilson sincerely tried to maintain what he

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perceived to be neutrality. Yet the fact that the president intended to be neutral does not establish the fact that the United States behaved as a neutral. Again, neutrality is determined by actions, not by intentions. The same distinction applies to the argument that the American government violated the principle of neutrality because it permitted businessmen to sell munitions and provide loans to the Allies. This decision resulted in an unbalanced trade that clearly gave the Allies an enormous, perhaps decisive, advantage over their enemies. Yet, under international law, the private citizens of a neutral state had every right to sell any products or to make any loans they wished to belligerents. If superior seapower allowed one belligerent free access to such resources while denying them to its enemy, the trade imbalance that resulted was in no way the neutral’s responsibility. The flow of American economic and financial resources across the Atlantic in no way constituted a violation of American neutrality: the law authorized neutrals to take certain actions, and it was indifferent to the effects of those actions—even when they favored one belligerent over another. The question must ultimately be answered by determining whether or not the United States met the requirements of neutrality as defined by international law in 1914. And the answer is clear: the United States was not entitled to neutral status because it failed to meet those requirements. The American government was obligated to defend its neutral rights equally against violation by all belligerents. Wilson permitted the Allies to interfere in American commerce with the Central Powers and with European neutrals in ways that were flagrantly illegal, while he refused to permit a similar liberty to Germany in its illegal submarine campaign against Britain. The result of this difference in treatment of the two belligerents was precisely what James Brown Scott, a leading international lawyer and chairman of the administration’s Joint Neutrality Board, had warned in September 1914 that it would be if the United States refused to act against the British blockade: “non-neutrality toward Germany.” 35 The United States did not become a belligerent until April 1917, but it had ceased to be neutral after August 1914. Why then did Wilson, if he was as sincerely committed to neutrality as he claimed to be, refuse to act within the existing definition of that status? That question can be answered only through an appreciation of the extent to which the president was unable to control the contradictory activities in which his subordinates engaged. The actions of Page, Gerard, House, and other official and unofficial agents of the administration were in themselves more than enough to undermine American neutrality, whatever the official position of the White House. Wilson knew of some of these indiscretions and suspected others, but made no effective effort to stop them by controlling or replacing those responsible.36 In the final resort the un-neutral acts of subordinates were possible only because of un-neutral acts by the president himself. If House and Page advised Wilson to challenge the German submarine but not the British cruiser, the decision was his and not theirs. The ultimate explanation for the failure of the

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United States to maintain its neutrality under law lies in the mind and heart of Woodrow Wilson. The president himself never acknowledged, publicly or privately, that his actions failed to live up to the laws of neutrality. He admitted that the British blockade did violate some existing neutral rights, but believed that the violations were of a technical nature and resulted primarily from the need to adapt sailing ship precedents to modern warfare. The obligation of the United States as a neutral was met, as far as Wilson was concerned, when his State Department filed formal protests with the Foreign Office: to go beyond such paper reservation of American rights would actually violate the principle of neutrality, since it would hurt the Allied war effort to a degree far out of proportion with the seriousness of the original offense. The actions of the British, even if technically illegal, resulted in the seizure of property that could be restored through established diplomatic processes. The German submarine campaign was different: it resulted in the destruction of American lives that could not be restored by diplomacy. The belligerents violated the neutrality of the United States in different ways and, in Wilson’s view, these differences dictated that he respond more severely to the more severe violations by Germany. He saw this distinction as the essence of neutrality, not a violation of it. As the war continued into its third year, however, this line of argument came to seem increasingly thin, even to Wilson. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that he became increasingly angry and frustrated with British actions. As Robert Ferrell notes, this anger and frustration eventually grew so severe that it “drove Wilson almost to real impartiality.”37 Ironically, Wilson became most upset when the British chose to prosecute British firms doing business with American firms that the British government had black-listed for suspicion of trading with Germany. The blacklist was entirely a matter of British municipal law and quite unobjectionable under international law—in contrast with just about everything else the British were doing to neutral commerce by this time. But “impartiality” was a matter of attitude, while “neutrality” was a matter of action under law. The administration never took any action, or made a credible threat that it would take action, to force Britain to respect the rights of the United States as a neutral. Wilson never understood that British violations of international maritime law were not legalistic technicalities growing from different definitions of how to adapt agreed principles to modern conditions. The British were violating, directly and deliberately, established legal principles. They were also violating the sovereignty of the United States by seizing American ships, cargoes and mail without legal justification. The foundation of the blockade was an Admiralty proclamation dated 3 November 1914, which announced that British mines had been scattered throughout the North Sea. German submarines had orders to spare American ships entering the war zone established by Germany around Britain four months later, although Berlin admitted that its captains might attack neutrals by mistake. Automatic contact

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mines in the British war zone threatened to blow up any ship that attempted to navigate the North Sea without sailing instructions—which the British provided only to ships that cooperated with Allied blockade authorities. Wilson sent an ultimatum in 1915 to protect the right of Americans, as citizens of a neutral state, to be free from submarine attack when sailing through the German war zone on munitions-laden Allied ships; two years later he went to war for the same principle. He simply ignored the danger that those same lives might be destroyed by British mines, although these were far more indiscriminate than German submarines. The real difference was not that the British blockade threatened property while the German blockade threatened lives: both German submarines and British mines threatened American lives. The difference in the president’s mind was that one blockade was British and the other German. Wilson did not understand the nature of the British blockade because he did not wish to. He believed that a German victory in Europe “would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.”38 He believed that Britain was a kindred democracy and a kindred spirit. He believed that blockade was one of the most formidable weapons the Allies possessed in the war against Germany. Surrounded by advisers who gave incoming reports a pro-Allied slant, convinced that a German victory would endanger the United States, Wilson was always able to find excuses to take no action against British violations of international law. To admit that Allied measures were as offensive to American rights, and as dangerous to American citizens as German measures, would have required Wilson to confront his own prejudices. It was easier to maintain that the British actions constituted only technical violations, quite different from those of Germany, and that true neutrality—as distinguished from empty legalism—required a strong stand against the latter and an understanding tolerance of the former. Whether American interests might have been better served by more effective neutrality or by earlier belligerency cannot be determined by the historian. What can be demonstrated is that the policy of non-belligerent nonneutrality proved a tremendous boon for American political and economic interests. By permitting Allied access to American supplies and credit while helping to protect that access by insisting on restricted German use of submarines, Wilson enabled the Allied Powers to compensate for the exhaustion of their own resources and thus to continue the fight against Germany. At the same time, his refusal to challenge the British blockade hurt the Central Powers economically and encouraged the Allies to believe they could win a decisive victory by starving out their enemies. Had the administration followed Bryan’s policy of banning munitions sales and loans to the belligerents, the loss of Allied war orders would have severely damaged the American economy. Had Wilson refused to defend neutral rights against Germany as he refused to defend them against Britain, the Germans would have initiated unrestricted submarine warfare earlier and might well have won the war. Had Wilson insisted that both belligerents respect neutral

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rights, the Allies would have had to abandon the hope that economic warfare could win a cheap victory and would have had far more incentive to consider a compromise peace. Had Wilson followed the advice of Lansing, House, and Page by entering the war earlier, American forces would have taken a much greater role in the fighting and suffered much heavier casualties. By abandoning neutrality and tilting the United States toward the Allies, but not declaring war until 1917, Wilson helped to maintain the stalemate that encouraged both sides to continue pouring blood and treasure into what became a mutual suicide pact. All the while the United States grew stronger and richer by remaining at peace and filling Allied war orders. The effect of American policy, although not its intent, was to create a power vacuum in Europe that in itself dramatically increased the relative power of the United States in the world. The same pattern is evident in Wilson’s decision to enter the war after almost three years as a non-belligerent. He did not come into the war in order to save the Allies from defeat, since at the time he believed they were winning. He asked Congress for a declaration of war on 2 April 1917 because he considered the German submarine campaign an act of war against the United States. His attempt to negotiate abandonment of the campaign with Berlin had failed; his attempt to secure Congressional approval for armed neutrality had failed. Left with a choice between either going to war or retreating from his warnings to Germany over the past two years, he chose to go to war. The result, ironically, was another boost for American power. The president fully intended to play an important role in the achievement of an Allied military victory, yet the administration’s failure to mobilize its military and naval resources before intervention left the United States a spectator in the bloody campaigns of 1917 and very much a junior partner in those of 1918. The “Yanks” were in fact “coming” to Europe—a testimony to the American genius for improvisation. Their presence, in itself, helped inspire the Allies to keep fighting, which was fortuitous because, when the American Expeditionary Force arrived in Europe, it turned out to consist of a mob of untrained recruits equipped with few of the tools needed for trench warfare. During the last months of the war, units of the AEF fought bravely and with increasing effectiveness. But they flew Allied planes and fired Allied shells from Allied guns. Deficiencies in equipment, training and shipping—each of which was ultimately the responsibility of the president as commander-inchief—ensured that Americans constituted only a relatively small percentage of the combat forces that broke the German army in the fall of 1918.39 This delay in effective military intervention resulted in short American casualty lists compared with those of Britain, France, or Germany. If the United States provided the financing and sustained the hope that was necessary to keep the Allied armies in the field in 1917 and 1918, the Allies continued to provide most of the blood. Wilson certainly would have been indignant at the suggestion that he delayed the despatch of an effective military force in order to spare American lives and wring the last drop of

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blood from his European “associates.” There is no evidence that he had any such purpose in mind. Yet whatever his intent, his policy did minimize American casualties and thereby increase postwar American power relative to both the Central Powers and the Allies. Much the same was true of intervention in the Russian civil war. Whether Wilson was an anti-Bolshevik crusader, a humanitarian protector, a confused man trying to muddle through an impossible situation—or all of the above— remains unclear.40 But whatever the motivation behind American intervention and however reluctantly it was undertaken, it encouraged continuation of a civil war that devastated Russia. It encouraged Britain, France, and Japan to invest far more than did the United States in the futile effort to overthrow the Bolsheviks. It also ensured that Russia would remain an ideological pariah, isolated from the peace settlement. Whatever American motives may have been, the consequence was another enormous increase in the relative world power of the United States. The fact that the United States had sacrificed relatively little compared to the European belligerents, and therefore possessed a fresh army and the world’s strongest industrial economy, gave it a potentially dominant position in shaping the peace treaty. The president had outlined his ideas for a fair, healing peace in his Fourteen Points speech of 8 January 1918: an end to secret treaties, freedom of the seas, free trade, disarmament, selfdetermination, and a world organization to maintain peace. When the German government requested an armistice on those terms in October 1918, Wilson used the threat of a separate peace to force the Allies to accept the Fourteen Points. Aside from a British reservation on freedom of the seas and a French reservation on reparations, all the major powers went into the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919 formally committed to the American plan.41 That formal commitment did not mean that the Fourteen Points were without their critics. The French premier, Georges Clemenceau, privately compared them to the Ten Commandments: noble principles of little relevance to the harsh realities of the world. Scholars of the “realist” persuasion have followed his lead, citing Wilson’s revolutionary program as evidence that the president was an idealistic crusader against a system he did not understand.42 This argument is largely one of semantics rather than substance. If it was “realistic” to revive the old balance of power system, which had just led directly to the death of millions of people, Wilson would have been the first to admit that he was not a realist. If it was “idealistic” to believe that nations could create a system that was better able than the balance of power to maintain peace, Wilson would have been first to claim that he was an idealist. He had seen millions die in a war in which civilization itself was brought to the brink of destruction. He believed there had to be a way to prevent such conflicts. The Fourteen Points represent the twentieth century’s most brilliant attempt to identify the causes of international conflict and to remove or reduce them. Had Wilson’s plan been implemented, the world would have been a more peaceful place.

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The Fourteen Points were not implemented, however. What Wilson should have done in Paris, or could have done, will be debated as long as historians study the twentieth century. What he did do is clear. He helped the victors redraw the frontiers of Europe and redefine the norms of international relations without the participation of German or Russian representatives. He ignored freedom of the seas, explaining later that Point II had been a “practical joke on myself” because it was implicit in Point XIV, the League of Nations. He helped to disarm Germany, but failed to persuade the Allies to follow suit and launched a massive American naval building program. He sanctioned violation of his principle of self-determination from Syria to Silesia and from Shantung to South West Africa. He created a league of victors rather than a league of all nations, then failed to secure the consent of the Senate required for American participation.43 Historians who seek to explain Wilson’s role in the peace-making process must begin by recognizing the enormous gap between his objectives and his achievements, between the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles. Why, given the power he possessed to impose his will on the Allies, did he compromise so many of his principles? Part of the answer clearly lies in his deteriorating health during the peace conference. A second part, perhaps even more important, lies in his faith in democracy, which would now be given the opportunity to exert itself through the League of Nations. Wilson acknowledged that there were flaws in the treaty. He regarded them as unfortunate but inevitable, given the bitterness the Allies felt after years of war. By creating the League and securing Allied participation in it, he believed he had created a mechanism to correct those flaws as the passions of war cooled. He could accept short-term compromises as the price to be paid for creating a viable League of Nations because he saw it as essential to lasting peace. Oddly enough, the Treaty of Versailles and its subsequent rejection by the Senate produced yet another unanticipated increase in American power. By the time Wilson left office, Europe was weaker and more divided against itself than it had been for centuries. Russia, which was just beginning to emerge from its civil war—its second massive bloodbath in seven years—was still an ideological pariah. Eastern Europe was fragmented. Germany was crippled by its wartime losses, unstable in its new democratic government, economically devastated and utterly determined to overthrow the system imposed upon her at Versailles. Britain, France, and Italy were almost as crippled by victory as their former enemy was by defeat, staggering under political and economic instability and facing astronomical debts to the United States. They squabbled amongst themselves and, in an effort to maintain a status quo that was dissolving under their feet, committed resources that they could not afford. The situation outside Europe was equally satisfying to the United States from the perspective of machtpolitik. Latin America was securely within the American orbit. The expanded European and Japanese colonial empires already were showing the strains of absorbing the enormous acquisitions they

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had demanded so vociferously at the peace conference. Yet Wilson’s ineffectual resistance to these demands had distanced the United States to some degree from the colonial powers. Over the next two decades America’s potential rivals for world power would continue to squander precious resources in their efforts to solve colonial problems that had been created by the failure to implement Point V. The United States, behind its selective antiimperialism and its selective open door policy, continued to forge ahead in comparative economic terms. These consequences were completely unanticipated, of course, by the president who had negotiated the Treaty of Versailles but who had not been able to win Senate consent for its ratification. Wilson opposed those economic and territorial clauses that made the settlement so unstable. He did everything he could to get the Senate to approve the treaty as he submitted it, though he resisted fiercely every attempt to modify his text through reservations. He set out to build a functional world organization that would reduce or even eliminate the possibility of war. He ended up helping to plant the seeds of the bloodiest war in human history, which began twenty years after the signing ceremony at Versailles ended “the war to end all wars.” Yet by his failure to achieve his goals at Paris and in the Senate he also planted the seeds of American preeminence in world affairs over the second half of the twentieth century. Again, the pattern is complex and contradictory. Wilson certainly was not the dedicated crusader against the Left or against revolution that has been pictured by some historians. Nor was he a tool of American business expansionists. Wilson thought of himself as someone on the Left who advocated revolutionary change in international relations. If he opposed the Bolshevik government of V.I.Lenin in Russia, he supported the democratic socialist government of Friedrich Ebert in Germany. If he opposed revolution in the Caribbean, he supported it—however ineffectually—in China and practically demanded it in Germany.44 Like every president since George Washington, Wilson believed that expansion of trade would benefit the economy of the United States and provide jobs for its citizens. But the suggestion that he would enter a world war to save the house of Morgan or that economic concerns dictated his foreign policy is not supported by the evidence. Instead, ideological and economic concerns were among the many factors that influenced his decisions; they were sometimes central but were often peripheral, or even negligible. It was not the success of his policies that built American political and economic power around the world, but their failure. The single most significant result of American foreign relations from March 1913 to March 1921 was one the president never planned: the rise of the United States to a position of unrivalled world power. Wilson’s neutrality policies helped to maintain an artificial strategic balance that encouraged both belligerent camps to exhaust themselves in pursuit of decisive military victory while the United States enjoyed three years of peace and prosperity. His war

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policies helped to secure the defeat of Europe’s most aggressive power while ensuring that Britain, France, Russia, and Italy paid most of the blood price that victory over Germany demanded. His peace policies left the exhausted European allies struggling to control overextended colonial empires while simultaneously attempting to maintain a European status quo that Germany, the Soviet Union, and several smaller powers were determined to overthrow. His failure to win Senate support for his peace policies ensured that the Allies would have to do their controlling and maintaining without American support. Had the president of the United States deliberately set out in March 1913 to bleed the Great Powers of Europe to death over the next eight years and expand American influence to fill the vacuum, he could hardly have been more successful. Since Woodrow Wilson was himself and not Cesare Borgia, there is not a shred of evidence to indicate that such was his intent. On the contrary, the pattern that emerges is of a brilliant, erratic, willful man, often meddling in affairs he did not understand through agents he did not control and producing results he did not anticipate. He came into office with little interest in foreign affairs, but quickly mastered the subject. By 1917 his analysis of the roots of international conflict was extraordinarily sophisticated. He was the first world leader to recognize that the old world order could not be rebuilt, that to restore the system of uncontrolled nationalism and the balance of power would condemn humanity to continue an endless cycle of conflict. He sought to create a new system of international relations, one based on a League of Nations united under the democratic, progressive leadership of the United States and the British empire. The fact that the League, in the absence of American participation, fell far short of Wilson’s expectations does not detract from the genius of his vision. By the same token, however, historians cannot allow the glory of the vision to distract attention from the consequences of Wilson’s failure to achieve it. Noble failure in the highest cause remains failure, and Wilson ultimately achieved neither peace without victory nor a functional international organization. Instead, largely through the unanticipated consequences of his actions rather than by design, he achieved an enormous increase in American power relative to the rest of the world. The United States he turned over to Warren G. Harding in March 1921 had no rival in the western hemisphere and no potential European or east Asian challenger to the Monroe doctrine. Europe was weak and divided against itself, with the winners as bankrupt and exhausted as the losers and more in debt to the United States. Wilson’s promise to guarantee the peace settlement and French security turned out to be empty. Japan’s gains at the expense of China ensured that the two greatest powers of the Far East would be locked into a quarter-century of confrontation between the imperialism of Tokyo and the rising nationalism of Nanjing and Yan’an. A navy “second to none” was filling American bases, while merchant ships carried American goods to ports all over the world. As the United States geared up for the “Roaring Twenties,” it stood in truly splendid isolation. The

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fact that Wilson achieved such a result while pursuing completely different objectives is simply the greatest “irony of fate” for an administration whose foreign relations resounded with ironies. The past decade has been an exciting and productive time for historians of international relations during the Wilson years, with major works appearing in the United States and in Europe. The recent completion of editorial work on Arthur Link’s magnificent multivolume edition of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson45 can only accelerate this interest by enabling scholars to examine essential documentation in their own libraries without the need for prolonged archival visits. While existing work provides a solid foundation, however, much remains to be done. Systematic examination of attitudes on race, which has brought such valuable insights to so many areas of history in recent years, is a particularly promising topic for research. Surely it is no coincidence that Wilson and so many of his key foreign policy advisers were white southerners who grew up in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. More generally, scholars need to be more open to complexities and contradictions, to the multiple levels on which the president and his administration operated. There needs to be more integration of different perspectives, particularly the impact of Wilson’s medical condition and the institutional confusion of his foreign relations establishment. Given the number of challenges that remain, there is every reason for the next seventy-five years of Wilson era scholarship to be as exciting and productive as the first seventy-five. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

For example, Charles Seymour, American Neutrality 1914–1917, New Haven, Conn., 1935. Charles Tansill, America Goes to War, Boston, 1938. Thomas Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal, Chicago, 1951. George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, Chicago, 1951. Convenient summaries of the state of historical debate on two major interpretive issues as of the early 1960s are Herbert J.Bass (ed.), America’s Entry into World War I, New York, 1964, and Ivo Lederer (ed.), The Versailles Settlement, Boston, 1960. Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations, Chicago, 1953. Edward Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power, Bloomington, Ind., 1955. Arthur S.Link, Wilson vols 3, 4 & 5, Princeton, N.J., 1960–5; further developed in The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, Nashville, Tenn., 1971. N.Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, New York, 1968. Link, Higher Realism. The same religious themes are elaborated by Kendrick Clements in Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman, Boston, 1987, and in The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Lawrence, Kan., 1992. David Trask, Captains & Cabinets, Columbia, Mo., 1972, p. 124. Lloyd Gardner (ed.), Wilson and Revolutions, 1913–1921, Lanham, Md, 1976; further developed in Safe for Democracy, New York, 1984, and “Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution,” in Arthur S.Link (ed.), Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982. Sidney Bell, Righteous Conquest, Port Washington, 1972.

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14 Lloyd Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, Wilmington, Del., 1991. 15 Elwin Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography, Princeton, N.J., 1981. This highly technical issue is examined at much greater depth in Link et al. (eds), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, N.J., 1966–, vols 58 & 64. 16 John Milton Cooper, “An Irony of Fate,” Diplomatic History, vol. 3, 1979, pp. 425– 37, argues that Wilson was not so unprepared, but he does so mainly by challenging the foreign affairs credentials of other contemporary presidents. To prefer Cooper’s assessment to Wilson’s own seems a case of being more royalist than the king. 17 Kendrick Clements, William Jennings Bryan, Knoxville, Tenn., 1982, supersedes other work on Bryan as secretary of state, although its attempt to label Bryan as isolationist and Wilson as idealist (see especially p. 110) raises more questions than it answers. 18 Rachel West, The Department of State on the Eve of the First World War, Athens, Ga, 1978, provides the best analysis of State Department confusion and demoralization under Bryan. See also Larry D.Hill, Emissaries to a Revolution, Baton Rouge, La, 1973. There is as yet no adequate biography of House, the ultimate presidential agent, although Charles Neu’s forthcoming work is eagerly anticipated. 19 Daniel Smith, Robert Lansing and American Neutrality, 1914–1917, Berkeley, Calif., 1958, remains the best account of Lansing’s bizarre relationship with Wilson. Calvin Davis is currently working on a study of Lansing as secretary of state. 20 Quoted in Arthur S.Link, Wilson the Diplomatist, Baltimore, Md, 1957, p. 26. 21 On Page, see Ross Gregory, Walter Hines Page, Lexington, Ky, 1970; John Milton Cooper Jr, Walter Hines Page, Chapel Hill, N.C. 22 W.Christopher Hamel, “The Illusion of Disinterest,” draft Ph.D.dissertation, Michigan State University, chap. 4; J.Halsema, E.J.Halsema: Colonial Engineer, Quezon City, 1991. Not all scholars would agree with Clements, Presidency, p. xiv, that Wilson’s administration was “without a significant scandal.” 23 Clements, Bryan, pp. 60–5. 24 John W.Coogan, The End of Neutrality, Ithaca, N.Y., 1981, pp. 182–91. 25 Wilson, quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, Garden City, N.Y., 8 vols, 1927–39; vol. 4, p. 289. On the Mexican revolution see the works by Gardner and Hill cited above, as well as Mark T.Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution, Tucson, Ariz., 1977, and Peter Calvert, The Mexican Revolution, London, 1968. On the policy of the United States in Latin America generally, see Gilderhus and David Healy, Pan American Visions, Tucson, Ariz., 1986. 26 There is no adequate overall study of Wilson’s racial views and their impact on foreign relations, but see Paul Gordon Lauren, “Human Rights in History Diplomatic History, vol. 3, 1978, p. 261. 27 Roy Watson Curry, Woodrow Wilson and Far Eastern Policy, New York, 1957; Michael H.Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven, Conn., 1987, pp. 108–9. 28 Burton F.Beers, Vain Endeavor, Durham, N.C., 1962. 29 For differing statements of this position see Tansill, America Goes to War, and Coogan, End of Neutrality. 30 Link, Wilson, vols 3–5, and Higher Realism remain the most complete and persuasive statements of this interpretation. 31 Kennan, American Diplomacy, and Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest remain the classic statements of this interpretation. 32 A Digest of International Law, Washington, 8 vols. The law of neutrality is covered primarily in vol. 7. Among the more ironic aspects of an administration whose history was filled with irony is that Moore had been State Department Counselor, second only to Bryan, but had resigned early in 1914 because of his frustration at trying to work with Wilson.

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33 Coogan, End of Neutrality, pp. 179–82, 249–52, and passim. 34 Quoted in Ray Stannard Baker and William E.Dodd (eds), The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, New York, 6 vols, 1925–7, vol. 3, pp. 157–9. 35 Quoted in Coogan, End of Neutrality, p. 173; on the specific British violations of international law which Wilson refused to challenge effectively, see pp. 209–15. 36 For example, the actions of House and Lansing described in Clements, Presidency, pp. 136–7. 37 Robert H.Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, New York, 1985, p. 10. 38 Quoted in House, diary entry, 30 August 1914, House Papers, Yale University. 39 Edward M.Coffman, The War to End All Wars, New York, 1968; Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I. 40 The anti-Bolshevik position is best stated in Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics; Gardner, Safe for Democracy; and Arno J.Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, New York, 1967. George F.Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920, Princeton, N.J., 1956–8 remains the best statement of the humanitarian argument. 41 Arthur Walworth, America’s Moment, 1918: American Diplomacy at the End of World War I, New York, 1977. Inga Floto, Colonel House in Paris, Princeton, N.J., 1980, provides a devastating indictment of its subject but neglects the president’s responsibility for his agent. 42 Kennan, American Diplomacy, remains the classic statement of this view. For a more sophisticated, updated version, see Lloyd E.Ambrosius, Wilsonian State-craft, Wilmington, Del., 1991, and Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, New York, 1987. 43 Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson; Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers, New York, 1986. 44 See Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985. 45 Princeton, 1966–.

6

The triumph of isolationism Thomas N.Guinsburg

The British statesman Lord Lothian, writing in 1929, underscored the ambivalence at the core of American international attitudes in the aftermath of World War I. The United States, he observed, “wants on the one hand to prevent war, and on the other to retain the right to be neutral in the event of war and to assume no obligation for maintaining world peace.”1 For the first decade of the interwar years, plagued by this divided mind, the United States settled for what Richard W. Leopold has termed the “interwar compromise” and assumed a posture aptly characterized by Joan Hoff Wilson as “independent internationalism.”2 While pursuing a more stable world order primarily via economic diplomacy, the United States avoided any substantial collaboration with foreign powers in the mechanisms of international peacekeeping. Cautiously, it moved away from its isolationist moorings: first, there was the Pacific treaty system negotiated in the Harding years; then subtle cooperation began with the League of Nations (which it would not join); then there was the circumscribed (and ultimately abortive) adherence to the World Court; and finally, the United States initiated the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy (without establishing the means of enforcing that ban). 3 The following decade witnessed the disintegration of the policy of compromise, as the Great Depression and the force of external events undermined these gestures toward international collaboration and bolstered the credo conventionally known as “isolationism.” Confronted by a worldwide collapse, which might plausibly have demonstrated the need for international collaboration, most Americans, as Robert H. Ferrell has noted, found “only additional proof of the folly of participation in the World War of 1917–1918, and the desirability, indeed necessity, of detaching the United States from further vicissitudes of Europe.”4 As if Europe’s debt defaults and political instability were not sufficient grounds for maintaining autonomy, it seemed reasonable for the nation to believe that to solve its domestic problems the United States should take refuge from international uncertainties. In the crisis at hand, Senator William E. Borah, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, proclaimed in 1932, “Americans should look after our own interests and devote ourselves to our own people.”5 90

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In the 1930s, the high priests of American disengagement had a long heritage from which to draw. From George Washington’s Farewell Address, through the irreconcilable manifestos of the years after the treaty of Versailles, influential leadership in the United States gave voice to isolationist aspirations, even as the nation never quite fulfilled them.6 To avoid making the term a caricature of American foreign policy, “isolationism” must be carefully defined. It never signified a posture of hermit-like seclusion; for better or worse—the influential Senator Arthur H.Vandenberg acknowledged on the eve of Pearl Harbor—in the twentiethcentury world “literal isolationism” was impossible. As William Appleman Williams and such “corporatist” interpreters of American diplomacy as Carl Parrini, Joan Hoff Wilson, and Michael J.Hogan have demonstrated, the quest for political non-entanglement and freedom from collective peacekeeping arrangements did not preclude active pursuit of conditions favorable to international economic expansion. Still, despite forceful attempts by Williams to suggest that isolationism might best be treated as a “legend,” a pronounced isolationist tradition endured in the 1920s and gained strength in the 1930s.7 A useful definition comes from Charles Beard, a scholar who disliked the term but understood its meaning. In the postwar context, Beard wrote, isolationism signified: Rejection of membership in the League of Nations; non-entanglement in the political controversies of Europe and Asia; nonintervention in the wars of those continents; neutrality, peace, and defence for the United States through measures appropriate to those purposes; and the pursuit of a foreign policy friendly to all nations disposed to reciprocate. An isolationist may favor the promotion of goodwill and peace among nations by any and all measures compatible with non-entanglement in any association of nations empowered to designate “aggressors” and bring engines of sanction and coercion into action against them.8 The writings of corporatist historians have not vitiated this definition; by properly insisting that what we have called isolationism did not mean fullfledged international withdrawal or diplomatic abstention, they have, perhaps unwittingly, helped to demonstrate the allure and saliency of the isolationists’ position. Support for such a posture had many wellsprings, and historians and political scientists have spent much energy arguing over whether the most important were geographic insularity, ethnic predispositions, partisan politics, or ideological perspectives. 9 In early attempts to delineate the roots of isolationism, such scholars as Ray Allen Billington and Jeannette Nichols called attention to the strength of isolationism in the Middle West and suggested that the insularity, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural makeup of the region might account for a peculiar foreign policy orientation.10 In fact,

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the importance once assigned to the Middle West as the bedrock of isolationism now seems exaggerated, as detailed analyses suggested that the differences between regions were those of degree, that midwestern fervor alone could not have provided isolationism’s political strength, and that the Middle West was by no means monolithic in its stance nor always the most intransigent toward international cooperation.11 Pursuing Billington’s contention that ethnic traditions might have prompted isolationist predispositions in the Midwest, Samuel Lubell concluded that regionalism itself was no key to explaining isolationism but rather that ethnic attitudes were the touchstone. In areas of pro-German or anti-British ethnic prejudices, Lubell asserted, isolationism flourished; in areas of predominantly Anglo-Saxon heritage, it did not. 12 This easy solution to the riddle of isolationism, however, also unraveled in the face of detailed analysis of the interwar years by Ralph Smuckler and myself, while assessments of the persistence of isolationism after World War II have as well failed to support Lubell’s neat distinctions.13 Partisan politics, too, have been credited with fostering opposition to internationalist projects, and those who study the makers of foreign policy have long recognized that politics do not stop at the water’s edge.14 Still it is hard to make a case that isolationism was rooted primarily in partisan politics; its zenith, in fact, came at the point where the partisan opposition had reached its nadir. While isolationism could sometimes gain support from partisan consideration, true believers like William E. Borah and Hiram Johnson generally made a virtue of shunning the dictates of party loyalty. Beyond regionalism, ethnicity, and partisanship, isolationism bespoke deeply held convictions about national destiny. Scholars such as Wayne S. Cole and Manfred Jonas, who led the way in taking the isolationists seriously rather than acceding to the mindless stereotypes of their foes, have amply demonstrated that isolationists, whether from “progressive” or “conservative” instincts, clung to a vision of their country in which the distinctive American heritage stood at risk. They feared an eclipse of political and economic liberty and democracy if the United States failed to separate its own interests and values from forces already threatening freedom and stability worldwide. 15 No single force—regional, ethnic, partisan, or ideological—was, in fact, sufficient to explain the strength of isolationism in the 1930s. In the face of pointed challenges, all were essential to its power. Relentlessly, the champions of the isolationist persuasion shrewdly exploited whatever attitudes could be harnessed to their cause. For almost the entire decade anxieties at home, compounded by bewildering events abroad, provided a milieu conducive to their triumph—a triumph that was by no means foreordained. It resulted from the most concerted and effective sort of crusade on the part of those who propounded it, and the timidity and irresolution of those who sought to deter it. How adamantly isolationist was the United States in the 1930s and what

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were the prospects for a more effective American effort at confronting the challenges to world peace? Answers to these questions are intimately related and together comprise a critical interpretive framework in which to depict the central path of American foreign relations in the turbulent years prior to World War II. The first standard accounts of the foreign policy debates of those years depicted a Manichean contest: an enlightened, if perplexed, internationalist leadership in the White House and State Department was supposed to have been temporarily vanquished by overwhelming forces of reaction, as the power of isolationist sentiment among the American people was given focus and leverage by their tribunes in the Congress. Works by historians Basil Rauch and William Langer and S. Everett Gleason refined but did not challenge the broad contours of the argument documented in the State Department’s compilation Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941. That volume had contended that public opinion in the United States, accepting “the idea of isolation expressed in neutrality legislation,” precluded the President and State Department from more vigorous response to mounting external dangers. Rauch wrote of a nation “bogged down in isolationist indifference for twenty years,” which would surely have rebuffed earlier and more direct challenges to its assumptions. Langer and Gleason, documenting Roosevelt’s convoluted “challenge to isolation,” and questioning whether the opposition was always as powerful as the President believed, nonetheless conceded that isolationism was buttressed by a public that “steadfastly shrank from facing the issues.”16 Early revisionism merely turned the tale on its head: clear-sighted noninterventionists strove, with initial success, to protect the national interest against a purposeful, scheming White House whose efforts would inevitably involve the nation in war. Charles Beard led the attack, contending that Roosevelt, at least outwardly, long adhered to isolationist policy as consistent with the best interests of the United States, only to embark subsequently on a disingenuous course in which he feigned support for non-entanglement while moving toward interventionism. Charles Tansill portrayed an administration quietly determined “to place America in the van of a crusade against aggressor nations,” which ended up “moving down the road to war while talking loudly about the importance of peace.”17 Neither interpretation has worn well. A subsequent generation of scholarship—benefiting from access to enlarged archival materials, greater distance from the emotion-laden debates of the 1930s, and perspective furnished by subsequent foreign policy debates in the United States—has generally come to shun simplistic portraits of heroes and villains. Though echoes of the old controversies persist, we now have the basis for a more subtle interpretation, wherein leaders on both sides of the 1930s debate were plagued by defective vision and flawed judgment and rendered the nation a prisoner of illusion as the world catapulted toward war. Assessing the contest over isolationism thus becomes a more interesting and complex task.

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FDR AND ISOLATIONISM: THE CAPTAIN AS CAPTIVE? The contest took form early in the decade. Even as the domestic economic crisis preoccupied the White House, international challenges demanded attention and presented alternatives. When the Japanese invasion of Manchuria broke the international calm in 1931, the response of the United States—“non-recognition” of Japanese territorial hegemony—while articulating concern for the crisis, showed a respect for isolationist sensibilities. Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who suggested the possibility of using economic sanctions as a diplomatic mechanism or making a collaborative effort to implement the Kellogg-Briand Pact, was held in check by President Herbert Hoover.18 This early episode reveals not that the United States was indifferent to challenges to the international equilibrium but that it continued to believe that symbolic gestures and the use of moral suasion were likely sufficient and all that could be prudently applied to the circumstances at hand. In retrospect, it is beguiling to see it as the first in a domino-like series of events that inexorably led to the breakdown of collective security and inaction in the face of aggression. Yet the triumph of isolationism was far from settled in 1932. When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, many hoped that the New Deal in domestic affairs would be accompanied by a new deal in foreign relations—in which FDR, the Wilsonian protégé, would soon redeem the promises made by his former chief after World War I.19 That expectation was not to be, for reasons that historians continue to debate and that the remainder of this essay seeks to explore. Franklin Roosevelt came to office confronting both a devastating socioeconomic crisis at home and an international scene filled with uncertainty and potential peril. If the domestic crisis understandably dominated the headlines and the early political agenda, immediate and prospective threats to the stability of the broader international economic and political structure demanded attention as well. Those who have criticized the lack of clarity and effectiveness in American policymaking during the 1930s have the luxury of analyzing each issue separately and abstractly; those with the responsibility for governance had no such freedom from complicating interrelationships and formidable obstacles. Included in the obstacles that confronted FDR were external events not always susceptible to American influence, domestic priorities that sometimes competed politically and substantively against would-be international stratagems, and opposing viewpoints that were articulated in powerful forums. Students of the era need to recognize the complex domestic and world environments in which the Roosevelt administration groped for a coherent policy, the bureaucratic in-fighting that inescapably accompanied so large and crowded a domestic and international agenda, and the dilemmas of leadership in a democratic society. In this context, the tasks confronting Roosevelt were daunting, errors unavoidable, and steadfastness not fully sustainable.20

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Strong isolationist leadership, opposing what overall design Roosevelt did pursue, managed until the outbreak of World War II to circumscribe severely the nation’s capacity to react politically and militarily to external aggression. Their beliefs and motivations, too, as recent studies have demonstrated, are both more complicated and more justifiable than was assumed by the early commentators who branded them “illustrious dunderheads.” As suspicious and fearful of Roosevelt’s power as he was of theirs, they understandably lacked a balanced view of their adversary and the advantages of twenty-twenty hindsight. If their successes in the 1930s do not seem worthy of historical celebration, neither do they warrant mindless vilification.21 Unquestionably, though, the centerpiece of all assessments of the era is the powerful if enigmatic figure of FDR. “Like a colossus,” writes Frederick W. Marks III in a recent reappraisal, “he bestrode American diplomacy for twelve tumultuous years. Sphinx-like, he continues to baffle each generation of historians.”22 Controversies abound concerning FDR’s principles and goals in foreign policy, about his consistency in applying them, his honesty in articulating them, and his judgment and leadership in confronting the obstacles to them. “Most scholars would agree,” Marks writes, “that Roosevelt could have done a good deal more than he did to combat isolationist sentiment, especially during his initial term of office.”23 Of course, he could have and probably in certain instances he should have, but at what risks or costs? Marks’s analysis here and elsewhere in his provocative revisionist work begs the question of why Roosevelt shunned the possible alternatives and whether, in the context of the times, commentators then and since should reasonably have expected more boldness in presidential leadership. Marks, though, goes even further, contending that “isolationism in the mid to late 1930s might have been less of a problem for Roosevelt had he not done so much to foster its growth.”24 Foster its growth? If so, FDR himself stands as a principal architect of isolationism’s triumph, and familiar portraits of the era would be chromatically reversed. Robert Dallek, in his comprehensive study Franklin D.Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945, takes pains to explore “the constraints under which [FDR] had to work in foreign affairs” and generally sustains the options pursued by the President. But even his essentially admiring overview makes evident that the substance and style of Roosevelt’s leadership were confusing: he lacked clarity, coherence, firmness, predictability and a consistent tempo.25 Roosevelt himself, had he lived to write his memoirs, might have grudgingly admitted as much. When asked by an admirer early in 1934 to articulate long-range planning guidelines for American foreign policy, he conceded his inability to do so and added that even if he had known how to do it he probably would not have pursued such a policy because he had learned from Woodrow Wilson’s experience that the public could not be attuned to the highest note in the scale without being discomforted.26 This explanation could be viewed as a rationalization by a leader who had

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himself retreated from an internationalist to an isolationist stance, seeking peace at almost any price.27 Certainly Roosevelt’s faith in the League of Nations had, by the time of his presidential campaign of 1932, withered to the point of his abandoning public support for its work. But it is going too far to conclude that Roosevelt and the isolationists occupied much of the same ground, apart from that which led them to seek a peaceable resolution of international tensions. Roosevelt’s retreats, as Dallek suggests, were due less to philosophical conversion than to “calculation about what he could achieve at home and abroad,” including the task of maintaining what Cole has delineated as an “uneasy alliance” between himself and the group of influential western progressives in Congress, many of whom supported isolationism.28 Recent scholarship, whatever its disagreements, shows a president who was, from the outset, actively interested in foreign policy questions.29 If Roosevelt pursued “first things first,” it was not that he set aside foreign policy goals. Rather he pursued those objectives in such a way as to avoid making a hostage of his important domestic initiatives. Given the importance of the New Deal agenda, and the isolationist fervor of the progressives in Congress whose support was necessary to its passage, Roosevelt shied away from boldly leading the United States in the direction of international collaboration. Dallek sees Roosevelt’s strategy as a series of necessary and prudent trade-offs; Marks regards them as pusillanimous. Both are too fixed in their judgments. It is impossible, even for Dallek, to rehabilitate Roosevelt’s torpedoing of the London Economic Conference. FDR built up expectations only to dash them and exalted international collaboration only to sacrifice it abruptly to “intranationalism.” In so doing he demonstrated a misplaced confidence that a residual effect of the Conference would be “continued international discussion of perplexing world problems,” despite the bitterness that its failure had evoked. In reality, as the columnist Walter Lippman noted, he had “failed to organize a diplomatic instrument to express” his excellent purposes.30 There were indeed instruments available to Roosevelt had he chosen to throw American influence behind collaborative efforts at maintaining peace. Roosevelt did make some use of these, but only in a manner that avoided the risk of a head-on collision with isolationist adversaries; he refused to jeopardize his domestic objectives or to escalate fears of American involvement in war. To the consternation of more dedicated internationalists in the State Department, while Roosevelt made gestures of undertaking initiatives aimed at deterring aggression, he caved in when the going got tough. In 1933 the White House approved administration sponsorship of an arms embargo bill that would have allowed the president to designate particular countries to which the embargo applied. Shortly thereafter, FDR authorized a proposal promising that, if a general disarmament treaty could be arrived at, the United States would be willing to consult with other states in the event of an

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international conflict and, if it concurred in the designation of an aggressor, that it would “refrain from any action tending to defeat collective effort” to restore the peace. Together, these propositions marked a high point in the professed willingness of the United States to cooperate with the League of Nations in a peace effort.31 Immediately, isolationists sounded the alarm. Several members of the Foreign Relations Committee—notably Hiram Johnson of California, William Borah of Idaho, and Robert La Follette, Jr of Wisconsin—unfurled the argument that international consultations, coupled with the power to discriminate among combatants, provided the president with a catapult to further action that might lead to direct involvement; they amended the bill to require a mandatory embargo against all participants in a conflict. The State Department persuaded Roosevelt not to accept the amendment, and the bill died in committee.32 With Senate isolationists on the rampage at the same time that their support for the New Deal remained essential, and with disarmament foundering because of European insecurity, one can understand why Roosevelt backed away on this issue. But his quick capitulation signaled an exaggerated caution and a lack of willingness to use his fabled powers of persuasion. Most importantly, the triumph of the isolationists represented Roosevelt’s failure to recognize that, without countervailing efforts on his part, isolationism would carry the day—not merely in 1933 but in the years to follow. If isolationism were to be combatted, the White House would have to do more. As the prospect of disarmament collapsed and combustible problems smoldered, fears of an international conflagration began to grow. Apprehensions about a future world conflict were nourished by the sentiment, fed by popular revisionist accounts of World War I, that US intervention in 1917 had been a grave mistake. With only slight exaggeration, Senator Homer Bone of Washington exclaimed in 1935 that “everyone has come to recognize that the Great War was utter insanity…and we had no business in it at all.”33 Focusing on such apprehensions and rhetoric, historians have tended to share Roosevelt’s perspective that isolationist sentiment was too powerful to combat in any direct way. Recent studies, however, have begun to cast doubt on the intensity of isolationism in the nation at large and on the likelihood that isolationist leaders in Congress would have been successful if the proponents of internationalism had been as committed, energetic, and resourceful as their foes. Even the Middle West’s commitment to isolationist orthodoxy appears to have been exaggerated. Furthermore, there was no omnipotent isolationist “bloc” in Congress or among opinion-makers, but rather a disparate aggregation of leaders—including many paragons of progressivism like La Follette and George W.Norris, as well as conservatives like Vandenberg and Hamilton Fish, old-fashioned nationalists as well as international-minded pacifists—who were able to band together effectively because they succeeded in donning the mantle of peace and security while their adversaries lacked effective leadership.34

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Only in the fall of 1939 did FOR grasp what had happened when he declared: “Let no group assume the exclusive label of the ‘peace bloc.’ We all belong to it.” 35 Ironically, by making this plea the president, perhaps unwittingly, recognized that the isolationists had successfully seized the initiative, captured public opinion and placed the administration in a position where its leaders felt unable to move purposefully either to deter aggression or to strengthen the forces opposing it. The pivotal contest had been fought four years earlier, in 1935, over the proposition that the United States should enter the World Court. The isolationists began the contest by recognizing that the platforms of both political parties, as well as public opinion, favored US entry, that the Senate was more than 70 per cent Democratic and contained only a scattering of opponents who were known to be against the proposition. Hiram Johnson claimed, with some exaggeration, that he was practically “alone” when the debate started—but he and Borah dominated the debate and conducted a superb campaign. As FDR refused to send a message urging approval at the outset of the contest, and as he personally joined the fray only toward the end, senators on both sides of the aisle perceived a breakdown in leadership. Twenty Democrats joined sixteen Republicans in defeating the measure.36 Roosevelt afterwards complained about twelve or fourteen senators who would not commit themselves, and he blamed the abnormal times for making people “jumpy and very ready to run after strange gods”; he failed to acknowledge that his own stand might have made a difference.37 Again, the argument can be made that there were critical battles ahead on the domestic scene and that Roosevelt’s strategy enabled him to avoid alienating insurgent Republicans on whom he might have to rely for support. But since he did not disarm the progressive isolationists by his passive stance and since it is not certain that many of them would have taken vengeance against the reform measures of 1935–6, would it not have been better to have prevented the ensuing demoralization of the internationalist ranks, a strengthening of the isolationist grip on public opinion, and vastly increased prospects for intransigence on foreign policy in the Senate? As it was, having failed to use his leverage and gain the advantage early, Roosevelt was now forced to yield center stage to the isolationists. By the mid1930s the Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry, headed by Senator Gerald P.Nye, riveted attention to the evils of arms sales and the virtues of neutrality.38 FDR’s prospects for acquiring discretionary powers worsened, even as the fears of conflict abroad mounted. The isolationists strove, with renewed intensity, to set the terms of the debate and seize the advantage, and on the issue of neutrality the president was persuaded to avoid a “head-on collision with the Nye Committee.”39 Diversity and rivalry among the isolationists as to the wisest sort of neutrality legislation did not prevent them from uniting against the administration. Roosevelt preferred no legislation at all to a mandatory law that would tie his hands or to a vehement, protracted controversy that would impede his domestic

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agenda. But the isolationists were by then—with the aid of a filibuster—able to obstruct presidential conduct of neutrality policy either via discretionary legislation or the absence thereof. “We hold the whip hand,” Nye boasted, “and we intend using it to the fullest.”40 So, indeed, they did, time and again. The neutrality legislation of the 1930s, as Hiram Johnson gleefully proclaimed, signaled “the triumph of the so-called ‘isolationists’” who “stood firmly for maintaining America’s pristine glory and keeping out of every foreign entanglement and every European war.”41 Not until after the outbreak of World War II could Roosevelt reclaim effective leadership of the foreign policy of the United States in the midst of the conflagrations in Europe and Asia—and even then he often succeeded only by guileful indirection. Concerned with his own political fortunes and the fate of his domestic programs, frustrated by the collapse of the League of Nations and the indecisiveness of America’s allies, Roosevelt capitulated time and again to isolationist sentiment. He was, moreover, himself uncertain of what politically acceptable steps the United States could take to influence events, and he was overconfident about Congress’s willingness to alter the fundamentals of neutrality policy once in place. Efforts at changing neutrality policy to provide more opportunity for US leadership, despite intensive backstage maneuverings by the administration, failed to withstand isolationist assault.42 THE LEVERS OF ISOLATIONIST POWER The great advantage enjoyed by the isolationists was that they knew what they wanted. Part of the problem for FOR was that neither he nor anyone else knew precisely where the world was headed and what the appropriate US response would be. In this sense, “internationalism,” especially within the foreignrelations bureaucracy, was too diffuse to provide a coherent policy, and those who espoused it could by no means agree on how it was to be put into practice.43 Isolationism, on the other hand, whatever divergences there might be on particulars, had the much simpler task of upholding political and military non-entanglement, a time-honored tradition that one advocate likened to “a north star, constant and steady, which will hold us true to our course.”44 Isolationism also derived strength from the very domestic circumstances that deterred more purposeful initiatives on the part of the Roosevelt administration. Tangible efforts abroad could be perceived as detracting from greater accomplishments at home: was entering the World Court more important, Huey Long asked, than putting clothes on people’s backs?45 Nor, as Wayne Cole and Ronald Feinman have shown, can progressive concerns about the political structure at home be dismissed as isolationist rhetorical camouflage.46 Amidst the menace to liberty abroad, it was not unreasonable to ask whether the nation wanted to take the risk of delegating authority to the president—responsibilities that might tip the scales toward undue centralization of power at home. Early fears of Roosevelt’s appetite for power

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gained reinforcement when he proposed to pack the Supreme Court and reorganize the executive branch. These initiatives did more than strengthen the determination of the isolationists to trammel Roosevelt in making foreign policy: they broadened distrust of the president to include many who were not necessarily opposed to his leadership in foreign affairs; and they bolstered, prior to World War II, arguments that Roosevelt the diplomatist had to be held in check.47 Comprehension of isolationism’s strength in the 1930s can be clouded by emphasizing its regional and ethnic underpinnings. While it is true that it was strongest in the West and Middle West and that it gained significant support among Americans of German, Scandinavian, Irish, and Italian extraction, it is also important to note that these sources by themselves were insufficient to sustain the nationwide success of isolationism in the 1930s. Ethnic prejudices alone, bereft of a broader credo of American distinctiveness, certainly could not have mounted an argument as compelling as that offered by the isolationists. Furthermore, if the anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism had been as prevalent among isolationists as their foes charged, would their appeal have been as magnetic as it was? In any case, scholars like Cole and Jonas have demonstrated that, with occasional exceptions, anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments were confined to the extreme edges of the isolationist movement.48 What we find in examining the isolationist success is, in fact, the power of a dedicated and able minority, espousing a vision of the nation’s destiny consistent with the popular reading of its past, fervently urging their program as vital to democratic liberty, and taking full advantage of the American political system to implant their position as policy. Within the legislative arena, the twothirds rule for the passage of treaties, such as the World Court protocol, or for bringing closure to debate in the Senate, meant that isolationist leaders had the capacity to triumph despite their small numbers. Opportunity for protracted debate gave them the time they needed to trumpet their case and mobilize additional support; the threat of filibuster gave them the chance to exact concessions from an administration anxious to avoid battle or to pursue other priorities. The Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee provided a vehicle that enabled dedicated isolationists like Borah, Johnson, Vandenberg, and La Follette to enhance their following and build a stronghold, because those on the committee that supported the administration—including the chairman, Key Pittman— lacked a similar fervor. Isolationists succeeded in exploiting legislative hearings to boost support, bottling up a number of measures and intimidating the president into proceeding with great caution and making critical concessions. With the White House hesitant and with internationalist sentiment muted within Congress and across the nation, a determined minority continued to “hold the whip hand” and have their way.49 The triumph of isolationism in the 1930s thus depended less on the power of the abstract credo than on a complicated political process, about which facile judgments should be avoided. In examining Roosevelt’s encounters with the

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isolationists, we should now phrase our central question more precisely: did this president, under these circumstances at home and abroad, faced by these adversaries, in this political system have a reasonable chance to move the country more purposefully toward collective security in the name of peace? Without indulging in the sort of “iffy” history that FDR himself justly derided, we cannot be at all sure. FDR’S STEWARDSHIP: WHAT PRICE PRUDENCE? We can speculate that greater resolution between 1933 and 1935 might well have altered the results of an early contest or two, especially that over the World Court. Yet there are no assurances that, ultimately, such a victory would have made much of a difference, or that the eventual ramifications on international affairs would have been more satisfactory. 50 Furthermore, earlier, more strenuous, exertions on Roosevelt’s part might only have thrown the spotlight sooner on the issue of the expanding power of the president, with the consequent backlash that we now know emerged. Finally, with no guarantees of a more successful outcome, can we be sanguine about would-be initiatives that might have jeopardized Roosevelt’s effort, in Dallek’s words, “to meet worldwide attacks on democracy by preserving it in the United States,” in maintaining the United States as a symbol of progressive change in a world desperate for such an example?51 Still, even as we avoid overly simplistic second-guessing of Roosevelt’s stance in challenging isolationism, we can express some legitimate concerns. For if constraints on his leadership limited his ability to win the contests at hand, could he not at least have done more to encourage his countrymen to be more skeptical about isolationist dogma? A president who elsewhere showed a stunning ability to make the office what his cousin Teddy had dubbed it, a “bully pulpit,” FDR left the American people to be educated first by the isolationist reading of events and then by the all-too-brutal reality of events.52 Roosevelt, with little circumspection, seems to have sloughed off any opportunities to educate the American public until at least 1937. Instead, though he groused privately, he accepted the isolationist victories from 1935 through 1937 with almost no public remonstration. Because it did no immediate damage, he could term the neutrality act that set the precedent of limiting his powers “entirely satisfactory.” And in the midst of the 1936 election campaign, in which he would triumph overwhelmingly, he could not resist talking about his commitment to “isolate” America from war.53 It was not until the fall of 1937, in the famed quarantine speech, that Roosevelt felt free to begin to launch a public education effort. But even then the isolationists, having severely limited his options, prevented FDR from moving confidently and steadily along the path of international responsibility.54 This failure to educate relates to another shortcoming of Roosevelt’s leadership: lack of coherent planning. Again acknowledging that the kaleidoscope of circumstances abroad and at home could not have produced a

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fixed or consistent grand design, when one reads the presidential papers and the diaries and memoirs of a variety of State Department officials, one feels a little like Alice in Wonderland searching for stable moorings. The Roosevelt foreign policymaking apparatus, Justus Doenecke and John Wilz have concluded, “appeared to make an absolute virtue out of government by improvisation…. The president moved by fits and starts; there was little cohesion.”55 That sort of leadership not only confounded the nation’s allies and adversaries; it left a void in public comprehension that the isolationists were quick to fill. Had Roosevelt made a greater effort earlier on in his administration to achieve consistency in foreign policy and to educate the public in the realities of international affairs, it is possible that he might have been able to lead the nation at least a little more effectively through the agonies of 1939–41. As it was, the dominance of isolation came to an end slowly and painfully. That phase of Roosevelt’s leadership goes beyond the scope of this essay, and is itself fraught with controversy.56 Here we can merely ask if, in ceding early some of the responsibilities of leadership, did Roosevelt not in some measure add to his difficulties in the period prior to American entry into the war? Whatever our answer, we know that even after the outbreak of war, the foundations of isolationism did not suddenly crumble. Public opinion had shifted from strict neutrality to an aid-short-of-war sentiment, but FDR nonetheless struggled to find a politically acceptable means of satisfying that sentiment without inciting fears of intervention. Though willing to challenge the isolationists directly for limited objectives such as repeal of the arms embargo and passage of the selective service and lend-lease measures, Roosevelt had to resort, simultaneously, to a campaign to discredit the isolationists and secretive and deceptive overseas initiatives, both of which sometimes transgressed constitutional scruple.57 The isolationists, of course, had long warned of Roosevelt’s abuse of power and that the effort to save democracy abroad would threaten it at home. In 1940–1 they believed their forecasts were coming true, without ever understanding the degree to which their earlier triumphs had helped to make their prophecies self-fulfilling.58 For his part, Roosevelt, as even his admirers concede, “in his determination to save democracy from Nazism…contributed to the rise of some undemocratic practices in the United States.”59 Thus, while the great debate between isolationism and internationalism ended at Pearl Harbor, troubling residual issues endure, and the challenge of historical interpretation continues unabated. NOTES 1 Quoted in Roland N.Stromberg, Collective Security and American Foreign Policy, New York, 1963, p. 60. 2 Richard W.Leopold, The Growth of American Foreign Policy, New York, 1962, chaps 31–5; Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, Boston, 1975, p. 168. 3 See, in addition to the previous chapter and Leopold, Growth, the incisive synthesis

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by Warren I.Cohen, Empire without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations, 1921–1933, Philadelphia, Pa, 1987. Robert H.Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression, New Haven, Conn., 1952, p. 18. Borah to M.H.Brownell, 3 January 1932, William Borah Mss, Library of Congress, Box 332. See Albert K.Weinberg, “The Historical Meaning of the American Doctrine of Isolation,” American Political Science Review, vol. 34, 1940, pp. 539–47; Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction, New York, 1957; Thomas N.Guinsburg, The Pursuit of Isolationism in the United States Senate from Versailles to Pearl Harbor, New York, 1982, chap. 1; and Wayne S.Cole, “Isolationism,” in Otis Graham Jr, and Meghan R.Wander (eds), Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times, Boston, 1985, pp. 211–13. Vandenberg to Irving Glasband, 18 November 1941, Arthur H.Vandenberg Mss, Clements Library, University of Michigan. Williams’s influential re-interpretation is found in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Cleveland, Ohio, 1959. See also Carl P.Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923, Pittsburgh, Pa, 1969; Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933, Lexington, Ky, 1971; and Michael J.Hogan, Informal Entente; The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918– 1928, Columbia, Mo., 1977. Charles A.Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–40, New Haven, Conn., 1946, p. 17, n. 2. The literature is summarized in Justus D.Doenecke, Anti-Intervention: A Bibliographical Introduction to Isolationism and Pacifism from World War I to the Early Cold War, New York, 1987, pp. 11–18, and critically examined in Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, pp. 9–14, 283–9. Ray Alien Billington, “The Origins of Middle Western Isolationism,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 60, 1945, pp. 44–64; Jeannette P.Nichols, “The Middle West and the Coming of World War II,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, vol. 62, 1953, pp. 122–45. William G.Carleton, “Isolationism and the Middle West,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 33, 1946, pp. 377–90; Ralph H.Smuckler, “The Region of Isolationism,” American Political Science Review, vol. 47, 1953, pp. 386–401; Warren F.Kuehl, “Midwestern Newspapers and Isolationist Sentiment,” Diplomatic History, vol. 3, 1979, pp. 283–306. Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 2nd ed.; Garden City, N.Y., 1956, pp. 137–43. Smuckler, “Region of Isolationism”; Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism; and Robert P.Wilkins, “The Non-Ethnic Roots of North Dakota Isolationism,” Nebraska History, vol. 44, 1963, pp. 205–11. Julius Turner, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress, Baltimore, Md, 1951; George Grassmuck, Sectional Biases on Foreign Policy, Baltimore, Md, 1951. Wayne S.Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, Lincoln, Neb., 1983; Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941, Ithaca, N.Y., 1966. US Dept of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941, Washington, 1943, pp. 2–3; Basil Rauch, Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor, New York, 1950, pp. 22, 145; The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940, New York, 1952, pp. 13, 201. Beard, Foreign Policy in the Making, especially chaps II and III; Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941, Chicago, 1952, pp. 237,349. Elting E.Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L.Stimson, Boston, 1960, pp. 382–98.

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Thomas N.Guinsburg See F.H.Simonds, “A New Deal in Foreign Policy?,” Harper’s, vol. 166, 1933, pp. 514–20. A superb examination of the challenges of assessing FDR’s foreign policy leadership is J.Garry Clifford, “Both Ends of the Telescope: New Perspectives on FOR and American Entry into World War II,” Diplomatic History, vol. 13, 1989, pp. 213–30. Efforts to avoid pejorative stereotyping and to understand the isolationists include Cole’s monumental Roosevelt and the Isolationists; Jonas, Isolationism in America; and Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism. For the epithet, see Rex Stout, The Illustrious Dunderheads, New York, 1943. Frederick W.Marks III, Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Athens, Ga, 1988, p. 1. Marks, Wind Over Sand, p. 166. Marks, Wind Over Sand, p. 20. Robert Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945, New York, 1979. The quotation is on page 529. Letter of 30 January 1934, cited in Edward M.Bennett, Franklin D.Roosevelt and the Search for Victory, Wilmington, Del., 1990, p. xxi. Robert A.Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, Baltimore, Md, 1969, chap. 1, “Roosevelt the Isolationist.” Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, p. 530; Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, Part I, “An Uneasy Alliance.” See also Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr, “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Internationalism,” in Cornelis van Minnen and John F.Sears (eds), FDR and His Contemporaries, New York, 1992, pp. 3–16. See Marks, Wind Over Sand, pp. 13–39, and Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 23–58. Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 35–57, explains the delicate balancing act of Roosevelt’s diplomatic and economic goals but without much persuasiveness. On the inherent self-contradictions of the administration’s stance see Elliot Rosen, “Intranationalism vs. Internationalism: The Interregnum Struggle For the Sanctity of the New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 81, 1966, pp. 274–92. Cordell Hull, Memoirs, New York, 1948, vol. 1, p. 228; Robert A.Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality, Chicago, 1962, pp. 43–51. Robert A.Divine, “Franklin D.Roosevelt and Collective Security, 1933,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 48, 1961, pp. 56–9. Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 13779. See the works cited in note 21, above, and Kuehl, “Midwestern Newspapers and Isolationist Sentiment.” New York Times, 22 September 1939. The defects of administration handling of the World Court proposition have been analyzed in Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, pp. 155–76; and Gilbert N.Kahn, “Presidential Passivity on a Nonsalient Issue: President Franklin D.Roosevelt and the 1935 World Court Fight,” Diplomatic History, vol. 4, 1980, pp. 137–60. “Roosevelt can bulldoze Congress and he can hypnotize the people,” Chester Rowell had written earlier to his internationalist co-worker Esther Lape. “He will not need reason or logic for either of these purposes. But he will need intensity.” Rowell to Lape, 2 January 1934, copy in Franklin D.Roosevelt Mss, Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, Official File 202. Roosevelt to Elihu Root, 9 February 1935, and Roosevelt to Henry Stimson, 6 February 1935, in Elliott Roosevelt (ed.), F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928–1945, New York, 1950, vol. 1, pp. 450–1. See John E.Wiltz, In Search of Peace: The Senate Munitions Inquiry, 1934–36, Baton Rouge, La, 1963. Memorandum from Cordell Hull to Roosevelt, 14 March 1935, File 811.113/582, Dept. of State Mss, Archives of the United States.

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Divine, Illusion of Neutrality, pp. 97–114; Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, pp. 166–79. Nye’s statement is found in Cole, p. 179. Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 14430. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, pp. 223–319; Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 122–91. See Howard Jablon, The State Department and Foreign Policy, 1933–1937, Lexington, Ky, 1983. Ernest Lundeen, radio address, 6 April 1938, National Council for the Prevention of War Mss, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1047. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists; Ronald L.Feinman, Twilight ofProgressivism: The Western Republican Senators and the New Deal, Baltimore, Md, 1981. For the role of reactions to Roosevelt’s “grabs for power” see especially Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, pp. 211–22, and James T.Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, Lexington, Ky, 1967. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists; Jonas, Isolationism in America. Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, pp. 143–217 and 289–92. Gerhard Weinberg’s penetrating studies conclude that Hitler’s formulation of foreign policy was undertaken with remarkably little consideration of policies and initiatives emanating from Washington. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933–1936, Chicago, 1970; and The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, Chicago, 1980. This point has been emphasized by Dallek (Franklin D.Roosevelt, p. 530), citing the eloquent contemporary views of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. See James MacGregor Burns’s Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, New York, 1956, whose assessment did not have the advantage of all that we know today about Roosevelt’s dilemmas but which retains an eloquent persuasiveness, especially on p. 262. Though Dallek rarely faults Roosevelt directly, his account itself points up instances where Roosevelt’s attempt to placate the isolationists may have gone too far. Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 108–22. See also Marks, Wind Over Sand, p. 20. Beard, Policy in the Making, cites more examples in order to demonstrate that Roosevelt’s earlier isolationist-oriented exclamations were betrayed by his later interventionism. Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 147–52. Justus D.Doenecke and John E.Wilz, From Isolation to War, 1931–1941, 2nd ed., Arlington Heights, III., 1991, p. 157. For a thoughtful assessment of much recent scholarship, see Clifford’s article “Both Ends of the Telescope,” cited in note 20 above. Roosevelt’s devious maneuvers are discussed from widely different perspectives, in William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, New York, 1953; and Tansill, Back Door, Marks, Wind Over Sand, and Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The sometimes over-zealous efforts to discredit the isolationists and stifle debate are documented in Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, chap. 30, and Richard E.Steele, “The Great Debate: Roosevelt, the Media, and the Coming of War, 1940–1941,” Journal of American History, vol. 71, 1984, pp. 69–92. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, pp. 409–55; Guinsburg, Pursuit of Isolationism, pp. 241–74, 293. Dallek, Franklin D.Roosevelt, pp. 312–13.

7

The interpretive wars over the Cold War, 1945–60 Melvyn P.Leffler

The Cold War may be over, but the debates over its origins and evolution persist. The arguments between traditionalists, realists, and revisionists still simmer, and they have been enriched and refined by new interpretations such as those referred to as “postrevisionist,” “corporatist,” and “world systems.” Historians want to know how the Cold War got started and why. Not content to look only at the personalities of Stalin, Roosevelt, Truman, and Churchill, they are studying the bureaucratic and political institutions as well as examining the impact of economics, ideology, geopolitics and strategy. Historians of US foreign relations now use not only the documents of the State Department and the personal manuscript collections of key officials but also the records of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the Treasury Department and the Economic Cooperation Administration, the business community and labor unions, Congressional committees and political parties. The debates among historians of the Cold War is no longer restricted to Americans: scholars outside of the United States have enlivened the controversy, often by utilizing the national archives of their own country. Hence some historians looking at British records attribute responsibility for important initiatives to Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary.1 Likewise, writers using French and Italian records suggest that the international order created after World War II cannot be understood without studying how domestic politics in those nations influenced the actions of the great powers.2 Similarly, students of Chinese and east European history have been showing how internal struggles and policy debates shaped foreign policy choices and options,3 while those who examine the globalization of the Cold War have been demonstrating that the leaders of third-world nations were not simply the pawns of the Americans and the Soviets, but could also be manipulative, cunning, and shrewdly self-interested.4 So the history of the Cold War grows more exciting and sophisticated, even as the worries about great power confrontation and nuclear holocaust abate. Participants in the scholarly dialogue seem to want to distance themselves from some of the vituperative exchanges that went on in the 1960s and 1970s 106

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among traditionalists, realists, and revisionists, but they also know they cannot circumvent some of the critical questions that those controversies raised. Traditionalists claimed that the Cold War was the result of the relentless expansionism of the Soviet Union and the paranoid personality of Joseph Stalin; they maintained that presidents Franklin D.Roosevelt and Harry S.Truman reacted slowly and did so out of their concern for democratic values and individual rights. Revisionists retorted that the United States was not guiltless; they charged that American power, spurred by possession of an atomic monopoly and interacting with fears about another depression, pushed the United States into an expansionist mode of its own.5 The memoirs and diaries of American officials provided the grist for the traditional interpretation. President Truman, secretaries of state James Byrnes, Dean Acheson and many of their advisers crafted accounts of the early Cold War that exonerated themselves from any fault while attributing to the Soviets the responsibility for the breakdown of the coalition that had won World War II. They claimed that the United States sought to cooperate with the Kremlin at the end of the war, but Stalin tried to impose his rule over all of Eastern Europe. And his demands elsewhere were insatiable. Basically, he wanted to enslave all of Europe by taking advantage of the widespread economic and social distress that followed the war, and he aimed to rupture the great coalition because the specter of foreign encirclement was indispensable for maintaining communist totalitarian controls and his own dictatorial rule at home. George F.Kennan, the American charge d’affaires in Moscow, presented these views in diplomatic dispatches in 1945 and 1946. He was recalled to Washington and articulated them again in a series of speeches and in a renowned article in Foreign Affairs. Subsequently, he qualified some of his original thoughts and altered many of his policy recommendations, but the image of a relentlessly expansionist Soviet Union bent on exploiting every opportunity and seeking ideological aggrandizement and imperial domination cast huge shadows over subsequent generations of cold war historical scholarship.6 These views were reinforced in a number of important books written by influential analysts of Soviet foreign policy. Adam Ulam, William Taubman, and Vojtech Mastny agreed that, although he had no blueprint for world domination, Stalin was a cunning, ruthless, and paranoid statesman who was moving cautiously, yet systematically, to grab control over Eastern Europe, lure Germany into the Soviet orbit, and capitalize on the success of communist parties in France and Italy.7 This traditional perspective still has many proponents. In a widely acclaimed study of The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East, Bruce Kuniholm portrayed an expansionist Russia hoping to seize parts of Turkey, gain control of the Dardanelles straits, foment unrest in Iran, and capitalize on communist strength in Greece. The United States, Kuniholm concluded, “was forced to act.”8 Hugh Thomas, a British historian, reached a similar verdict in 1987. In his comprehensive account of the beginnings of the Cold War,

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Thomas acknowledged that Stalin had limited short-term objectives and that he sought to avoid war. Yet Thomas insisted that historians should not neglect the “extreme subtlety of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy” and the “brute force of Communist methods.” Stalin’s aims were clear: “in the far distant future the establishment of a Russified world state; in the middle distance, a Soviet Union surrounded by a network of Communist-inspired republics…”9 In their recent survey of the causes of the Cold War, Randall Woods and Howard Jones restated these views. They were more nuanced than Thomas and they attributed considerable importance to American public opinion and British pressure, but their major emphasis was on the intransigence of Soviet negotiators, the machinations of Soviet diplomacy, and Stalin’s desires “to foster Soviet control of Eastern Europe…to expand Soviet influence in Western Europe, the Near East, and Asia; and to position the USSR for even greater gains when the next Western economic crisis struck.”10 Some scholars, usually referred to as “realists,” did not place quite so much responsibility on the Soviet Union: they did not think the Kremlin was motivated by ideological imperatives, nor did they believe Soviet goals to be unlimited. No one put the realist perspective more succinctly than did John Spanier. The post-World-War-II conflict, he wrote, “was not fundamentally due to the personalities of leaders or to the principal contestants’ domestic political or economic systems; it was essentially due to the nature of the state system and the emergent bipolar distribution of power, which led each state to see the other as the principal threat to its security and to take the appropriate steps.”11 Historians who were labeled “revisionist” disagreed with this stress on the international system. The most influential revisionist works were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inspired by the writings of Charles Beard and William A. Williams, outraged by the war in Vietnam, and armed with the recently opened manuscript collections of many officials and the newly declassified documents of the Department of State pertaining to the mid1940s, they emphasized the domestic sources of US policies and challenged traditional notions that the United States was restrained, naive, and innocent. They believed that the United States sought to create a peaceful and prosperous multilateral world order that would be conducive to the spread of American values and interests. Some (but not all) revisionists attributed narrowly economic motives to US officials. Most saw a complex interweaving of economic and ideological variables, fueled by a sense of overweening power and of stark fears that the nation might sink into another depression. In provocative, insightful, and well-researched books and articles, Barton Bernstein, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas Paterson, Bruce Kuklick, and Walter LaFeber showed how the United States sought to retain an open sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, erode the influence of communists in Western Europe, revive capitalism and liberalism in western Germany and forestall revolutionary nationalism in the Third World. They showed how plans to create postwar political and financial institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund were part of this attempt to

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establish a peaceful and prosperous international order along liberal and capitalist lines. This open, multilateral world order would insure that American business could have access to the markets and raw materials that were necessary to sustain a full employment economy.12 Revisionists also argued that the United States was neither naive nor hesitant about using its power to achieve its objectives and to dominate the postwar order—or the “American Century,” as they liked to call it. Paterson, for example, suggested that Roosevelt, Truman, and their advisers were prepared to exact important concessions from the Soviets in return for a large postwar loan. But more important than the use of economic leverage was the availability of the atomic bomb. In one of the most controversial books of the revisionist genre, Gar Alperovitz maintained that Truman decided to drop the bomb on Japan in order to influence the postwar configuration of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. Relying heavily on the diaries of Secretary of War Henry L.Stimson, Alperovitz showed how discussions about the bomb almost always took place in the context of how to handle the Kremlin. 13 Not all revisionists agreed with the degree of importance that Alperovitz attributed to the Soviet factor in the decision to drop the bomb, but they all believed that the evidence unmistakably proved that Truman and Byrnes hoped that the dropping of the bomb would make the Soviets more malleable. They concurred that US officials assumed that the atomic monopoly would strengthen their hand in postwar diplomatic discussions and would evoke concessions from the Kremlin. They wanted Stalin to agree to free elections and non-discriminatory trade in Eastern Europe, to unified economic control of the four zones in Germany, and to Nationalist rule and the open door in China.14 The revisionists claimed that the Soviet Union was not unduly expansionist. They showed that Stalin was willing to make concessions over reparations from Germany and that he did not initially impose communist governments on countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They suggested that Stalin was responding to demonstrations of American power, to probes of his sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and to the deployment of US troops to Korea, China, and Japan at the end of the war. They stressed that the Soviets had legitimate security interests at risk when discussing the composition of governments on their borders and, even more so, when discussing the future of Germany and Japan. Some of these revisionist claims have found support in an eclectic array of studies of Soviet foreign policy. Although based on the same meager set of Russian source materials that had been available to scholars like Ulam, Mastny, and Taubman, and relying heavily on the memoirs of European communist leaders and on documents from Eastern Europe, scholars like William McCagg, Gavriel Ra’anan and Robert Slusser have shown that the postwar Kremlin was racked by fierce bureaucratic, ideological, and personal rivalries. 15 These feuds sometimes assumed far more importance in the calculations of Soviet officials than considerations of foreign policy. Although

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these accounts often obscured the dominating position held by Stalin, other writers who acknowledged Stalin’s preeminent place in the Soviet hierarchy nevertheless argued that he sometimes sought to restrain the efforts of foreign communists seeking to capitalize on favorable postwar conditions to win or seize power in their own countries.16 He was certainly more concerned with thwarting the revival of hostile German and Japanese power than with promoting revolution in the Third World, and even in parts of Europe.17 Some recent literature emanating from the Soviet Union suggests that the revisionists who emphasized Stalin’s circumspection and Soviet defensiveness may be right. Recollections by Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev, V.M.Molotov, Andrei Gromyko and Nikolai Novikov underscore Stalin’s respect for US strength and his fear that Americans were trying to exploit the power of the bomb to extract concessions from the Soviet Union. Molotov, an unrepentent Stalinist if ever there was one, notes that Stalin observed strict limits even while he sought to exploit opportunities. More illustrative of Russian perceptions at the end of the war are the memoirs of Novikov, wherein the former ambassador to the United States stresses the relentlessness of American imperialism and the threats it posed to the security of the Soviet Union. 18 Even in Dimitri Volkogonov’s acclaimed biography of Stalin, perhaps the most representative Russian book of the glasnost era, the author insists that American and British behavior at Potsdam “gave Stalin justified grounds for concern.” On virtually every page of the volume Volkogonov indicts Stalin’s crimes, brutality, and cynicism, yet he also stresses Stalin’s prudent cautiousness and non-provocative behavior in foreign policy. The Soviet dictator, Volkogonov says, was right to reject the Marshall Plan because it would have meant “virtual US control over the Soviet economy.”19 The quest for American hegemonic control over a reformed world capitalist system was the key component of Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s massive history of postwar US foreign policy. This was unquestionably the most important revisionist work of the 1970s, and what was so noteworthy about the book was that the Kolkos played down the importance of the Soviet Union and insisted that “American policy merely fitted the Soviet problem into a much larger context, a framework which would have existed apart from anything Russia might have done.” The overriding objective of US policy, the Kolkos claimed, “was to sustain and reform world capitalism.” And this goal was dictated by “the expansive interests of American capitalism,” an economy “with specific structural needs” that shaped the country’s “global role.” According to the Kolkos, “the Great Depression defined Washington’s wartime plans for the reconstruction of the world economy.” The United States had to create an open international order conducive to the free flow of American goods and capital. Socialism, state ownership, and revolutionary nationalism in the Third World posed serious problems to the United States. The Kolkos spent a great deal of time focusing on US rivalries with Great Britain, on US efforts to break down autarchical arrangements in Western Europe, on US attempts to reconstruct, integrate, and coopt Germany and

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Japan into a liberal-capitalist world economic order, and on US struggles to thwart revolutionary nationalist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Kolkos grasped the centrality of the dollar gap problem—the shortage of dollars available to foreign purchasers of American goods—and the sophisticated mechanisms that Truman and Eisenhower administration officials devised to funnel dollars to Europe and Asia through economic and military aid packages. The Kolkos’ book was a tour de force because it was so vast in its scope, because it scrutinized American behavior in all areas of the globe, and because it illuminated the complex interrelationships between military and economic policy, between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, between state and society. Yet its central themes were simple and straightforward: American policies were determined by the nature of its capitalist system and by recurrent fears of depression; American aims were to reform and sustain the international capitalist system; America’s great challenge was to defeat not the Soviet Union but the revolutionary Left.20 The revisionists had a great impact on assessments of US foreign policy because they accurately demonstrated that American officials were not naive, simple-minded, and defensive. Marshalling considerable evidence, they showed that Roosevelt, Truman, and their advisers grasped the likelihood of a postwar struggle with the Soviet Union and sought to safeguard US interests. These interests were shaped by the tradition of expansion in American history, by the dynamics of the American political economy of liberal capitalism, by a sense of political and racial superiority, by a need to avoid the mistakes of political isolationism and economic nationalism that had plagued the interwar years, and by the futile experience of trying to appease totalitarian foes. These revisionist views were anathema to traditionalists and conservatives because they suggested that the United States shared responsibility for bringing on the Cold War. Revisionist interpretations were gaining ascendancy in the early 1970s when John Lewis Gaddis published his prize-winning book The United States and the Origins of the Cold War. Gaddis did not deny that Stalin’s objectives were limited and he did not dispute that economic and ideological variables played a role in the formulation of American foreign policy. Hence he sought to coopt elements of the revisionist critique. But, while acknowledging that these factors were worthy of historical attention and while agreeing that US actions raised Soviet suspicions, he contested the centrality of their importance. Instead, he stressed the profound significance of the domestic political system, of partisan politics, of ethnic voting blocs, and of legislativeexecutive rivalries. “The delay in opening the second front [in Europe during World War II], nonrecognition of Moscow’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the denial of economic aid to Russia, and the decision to retain control of the atomic bomb can all be explained far more plausibly by citing the Administration’s need to maintain popular support for its policies rather than by dwelling upon requirements of the economic order.”21 Subsequently, Gaddis labeled his views “postrevisionist,” an interpretive

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genre that became highly influential in the early 1980s. Gaddis continued to claim that the Cold War was primarily the fault of the Soviet Union: “Stalin’s paranoia, together with the bureaucracy of institutionalized suspicion with which he surrounded himself,” made agreement impossible. There was simply nothing the West could do to allay Russian hostility, which “sprang chiefly from internal sources.”22 American officials were justified in believing that the United States needed to balance Soviet power, and that the way to accomplish this was to utilize American economic leverage to achieve geopolitical goals. Indeed, the focus on economic leverage as means rather than as ends became a key component of the postrevisionist critique. So did geopolitics. In Strategies of Containment, a book that made Gaddis famous in the 1980s, he declared “that American interest was not to remake the world, but to balance power within it.” Sounding like a realist, he wrote that containment was designed to prevent the Soviet Union from using its power and position to gain ascendancy in the international system. And in thwarting Soviet designs, Gaddis argued, the United States did establish an empire, but it was an “empire by invitation,” an empire that was created by the many governments who looked to the United States for protection against Soviet imperialism.23 By the time that Gaddis came to write Strategies he had been influenced by Geir Lundestad, a Norwegian historian, and by other scholars who were studying the internal dynamics of policymaking in European countries. These historians did not see the United States acting systematically to create an American world order in the immediate postwar years. Lundestad showed that American concern with Eastern Europe was often rhetorical and sporadic, that US policy lacked consistency of purpose, and that Washington’s actions were frequently influenced by local factors and external pressures. 24 Some studies of British diplomacy reinforced these findings, showing that the Labour government of Clement Attlee viewed Soviet actions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East with even greater alarm than the Americans, and that British officials pushed and prodded the Truman administration to take a tougher stand. Although Churchill was no longer in power, his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri symbolized British attempts to alert Americans to the Soviet threat and to harness American power on behalf of British interests, especially in the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East.25 This emphasis on the external sources of US foreign policy has resonated through some of the more thoughtful recent books and articles on US diplomacy in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was not pressure from the US government but domestic politics and the infighting among fractious political parties that prompted the Christian Democrats in Italy and the democratic Left in France to exclude communists from the postwar coalition governments; it was not Washington but London that inspired the North Atlantic alliance; it was not the Marshall Plan but French, German, and other European initiatives that were responsible for the success of European

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reconstruction and for the subsequent course of European integration. Even small countries in the Third World were alleged to have manipulated American fears about communist takeovers and exploited great power tensions in order to elicit guarantees and aid from the United States that they otherwise might not have received.26 By the late 1980s, the postrevisionist critique, the regional and local studies, and the examination of the external sources of US diplomacy put the revisionists on the defensive. So did analyses of public opinion and bureaucratic behavior. In books and articles, Ernest May disputed the notion that the rational pursuit of national self-interest shaped the course of US foreign policy in the 1940s and 1950s. Looking at the course of US policy in China, he stressed the impact of public opinion and legislative politics, and he focused on the battles between military and civilian officials. He also saw organizational feuds and interservice rivalries influencing the course of US defense policy and the deployment of US troops to Europe.27 Other studies of the US defense posture underscored the role of organizational self-interest and inept, if not irrational, presidential leadership. This was especially true of the work of David Rosenberg on the hydrogen bomb decision and the strategic arms race. Rosenberg showed how the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force, and the Strategic Air Command molded decisions that culminated in the build-up of a gigantic arsenal of atomic and nuclear warheads that made no sense in terms of the objectives of foreign policy and that were unwanted by Eisenhower himself.28 The size of the US defense budget and the relationship of the air-atomic strategy to diplomacy have become important topics in studies of the foreign relations of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and in the larger debate over the causes of the Cold War. Traditionalists and postrevisionists have argued that the comparatively small amount of military expenditures and the limited size of the atomic arsenal prior to 1950 demonstrate the nonaggressive, defensive, and reactive nature of US policy. They maintain that the attempt of Secretary of State Byrnes to use the atomic monopoly to leverage the Soviets into concessions failed, and that thereafter the strategic superiority of the United States was not of great utility in the nation’s diplomatic behavior. McGeorge Bundy, a national security adviser to President Kennedy, has argued along these lines in a thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis of atomic weapons and American diplomacy. The fear of mutual destruction deterred officials from pursuing a course of atomic diplomacy, and, he insists, Truman and Eisenhower eschewed nuclear blackmail in their dealings with the Russians and the Chinese.29 But these conclusions remain hotly contested. Although much information concerning the development and deployment of atomic weapons and strategic air power remains classified, Rosenberg, Gregg Herken, Roger Dingman, Robert Wampler, and Marc Trachtenberg have done pioneering work in this area. Trachtenberg, for example, has been studying the use of atomic diplomacy during and after the Korean War. At critical times during the 1950s

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officials used language and conveyed signals that were intended to intimidate the adversary and elicit concessions. More importantly, Trachtenberg argues that perceptions of the overall balance of strategic power continually influenced the diplomatic options chosen by US officials. Furthermore, he says, the deployment of tactical atomic weapons to Europe in the 1950s and the prospective nuclearization of America’s NATO allies, especially West Germany, had enormous repercussions on both Soviet-American and FrancoGerman relations.30 Trachtenberg’s conclusion regarding the relationship between the strategic balance and diplomacy might seem to buttress revisionist arguments about the use of military capabilities to support a pax americana, but it does not. This is because Trachtenberg has not spent much time yet examining the larger purposes of US foreign policy. One theme that resonates through some of his essays on the 1950s underscores Eisenhower’s desire to bring US troops home from Europe. This reinforces a key traditional and postrevisionist idea that US officials after World War II were not eager to intervene politically in Europe and never wanted to keep US troops there on a permanent basis.31 In some recent studies (such as those mentioned above), students of US foreign relations can see a welcome trend to integrate military and diplomatic history. Indeed one cannot examine the policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations anywhere in the world without utilizing both Defense and State Department archival materials. This is evident in some pathbreaking work on the Middle East and South Asia. In his careful analysis of US and British relations with Egypt from the end of World War II to the Suez Crisis of 1956, Peter Hahn shows that British and American concerns were focused on maintaining western access to the great air base at CairoSuez. British and American officials counted on the use of this base to launch their strategic air offensive against the Soviets, in the event of a global war. Notwithstanding American sympathy for Egyptian nationalist appeals to regain control over their own territory, Truman and Eisenhower administration officials (prior to 1956) hesitated to exert commensurate pressure on the British to withdraw, lest this interfere with their future ability to use this strategic base. Similarly, Robert McMahon has found that the aim of locking Pakistan into a strategic alliance with the United States accounted for the chaotic pattern of US relations on the Asian subcontinent.32 This concern with strategy departs from, but does not necessarily contradict, those earlier revisionist interpretations of US diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Southwest Asia as being dictated by the need to control the oil repositories in those regions. Indeed, the meshing of strategic and economic variables has been an important part of the agenda of the “corporatist” school of diplomatic history. Michael Hogan is the leading proponent of this interpretive model, and he has presented his ideas in his analysis of the formulation and implementation of the Marshall Plan. He contends that the Marshall Plan was not primarily a response to the communist threat in Europe or to Soviet expansionism—as

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traditionalists and postrevisionists claim—but part of “America’s twentiethcentury search for a new economic order at home and abroad.” That economic order was a corporatist order, by which Hogan means “an American political economy founded on self-governing economic groups, integrated by institutional coordinators and normal market mechanisms, led by cooperating public and private elites, nourished by limited but positive government power, and geared to an economic growth in which all could share.” The Truman administration, Hogan argues, “sought to restructure the world economy along lines similar to the corporative order that was emerging in the United States.”33 Hogan does not closely examine the motives that prompted US officials to pursue this new order. Unlike Kolko, for example, he does not stress the underlying structural economic forces that pushed the United States in this direction. But his analysis of the complex linkages between the public and private sectors and his emphasis on establishing a multilateral international order while reforming capitalism at home and abroad underscore some of the important points in the revisionist critique. And, although he dwells on economic and financial arrangements, he does demonstrate the strategic implications of the Marshall Plan. He stresses that integration was a key thrust of the Marshall Plan from the outset and that “integration was the way to reconcile Germany’s recovery with France’s security and bring both together in a unit of sufficient scale to contain the Soviets.”34 This theme of double containment, that is, containing both existing Soviet power and prospective German power, constitutes another important trend in recent historical writing. American officials were not simply worried about the Soviet Union. They were also fearful that an impoverished and disillusioned Germany might retard overall west European economic recovery and orient itself eastward. So Truman and his advisers chose to boost German industrial production, limit reparations, and unify the western zones. But at the same time they were fearful that a strengthened Germany might maneuver between the two blocs, act independently of the United States, and perhaps even provoke a full-scale war. Students of America’s German policy, like Thomas Schwartz, have shown how Truman, Eisenhower, and their European experts worked diligently to coopt German power for the western alliance. They had to do so because Germans skillfully manipulated American fears about their future alignment to further German goals, like the relaxation of occupation controls and the reassertion of German sovereignty.35 While responding imaginatively to concerns about Germany, however, US officials had to be careful not to alienate the French. As was the case after World War I, the French remonstrated that Anglo-American attempts to cater to the Germans endangered their security and conflicted with their need to gain favorable access to German coal in the Ruhr. Franco-German rivalries posed major policy dilemmas, and some historians like John Gimbel and Timothy Ireland have argued that the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic

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Treaty were primarily attempts to overcome these traditional disputes.36 Such claims are overstated because the magnitude of American concerns with these Franco-German controversies was certainly influenced by calculations about the advantages that the Soviet Union could reap from French disillusionment or German revanchism. But the focus on intra-European squabbles and on the attempts of Europeans to resolve these struggles has become an important subject of historical inquiry. During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the United States was not simply waging a bipolar struggle with the Soviet Union while other participants in the international system stood watching. Middling and small nations labored feverishly to pursue their own interests in the midst of this great power competition, and the Americans and Soviets could ignore them only at their own peril.37 Recognizing that the United States was grappling with a plethora of problems in the international system, another group of historians has found evidence supporting a “world systems” interpretation of US foreign policy behavior. This mode of analysis tries to integrate three critical variables: world position, state, and social situation. The United States, argues Bruce Cumings, “had real problems on its hands: the decline from empire of England, the intractability of the world economy, stagnant industrial allies, and at least one ‘grand area’ of the world now removed from capitalism: the Soviet sphere.” American foreign policy, Cumings stresses, must be understood in terms of its “structural position in a distinct world system…. The world market system placed similar but unequal burdens on states and societies, with economic competition the driving force, but with the nation-state being a prime vehicle of conflict, and with society reacting to market penetration in different but always significant ways.”38 Cumings and Thomas McCormick claim that US foreign policy was designed to revive and stabilize the world capitalist system and to preserve America’s leading role in that system. The sophisticated framework designed by Cumings considers the factional struggles within the business community, legislative politics and organizational rivalries. Against a vast panorama of conflicting interests and political rivalries, Cumings illuminates how the state preserves its autonomy above individual and class interests, seeks to maintain the system, and guarantees “the field on which the bourgeoisie plays.” To achieve these goals, American officials during the Truman and Eisenhower years often had to establish linkages with elites in other countries, help preserve them in power, and insure that their countries’ economies were integrated effectively into the world market system.39 One of the great attributes of the world systems approach is that it incorporates ideas from the revisionist and corporatist literature, which tend to stress the domestic sources of US foreign policy, without slighting the evidence that US policy was continually buffeted by external pressures, local rivalries, and regional struggles. Cumings, of course, uses this approach to explain the origins of the Korean War. The world system, he claims, was in precarious shape in early 1950 as Western Europe, Germany, and Japan were

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still experiencing terrible dollar shortages, as the British pound was tottering, as the Chinese communists were triumphantly taking over the mainland, and as US policy was foundering in view of the Soviet acquisition of atomic weapons. The eruption of hostilities in Korea provided an opportunity for Acheson and his aides to go on the offensive and to launch a series of initiatives to grapple with these profound threats beleaguering the functioning and stability of the world capitalist system. World systems can also help to explain the origins of the American embroilment in Indochina. Many recent studies trace the beginnings of the US involvement in this part of the world to American anxieties about the future of Japan. Acheson and John Foster Dulles did not think that Japan could support itself and maintain a stable democratic and capitalistic system without having access to markets and raw materials in Southeast Asia. Aware that Japan traditionally depended on extensive economic ties with Manchuria, north China, and Korea, and knowing that most of this area was now in the enemy bloc, Acheson and Dulles felt they had to link Japan and Southeast Asia. In this interpretation one sees the extent to which US officials believed that the industrial core of the world system had to be integrated with the underdeveloped periphery.40 But was economic competition the driving force behind this orientation, as most revisionist and world systems historians contend? In one of the exciting books that highlighted the Japanese-Indochina relationship, Michael Schaller was ambiguous about whether geopolitical, bureaucratic, or economic factors were most responsible for the integrated approach to the problems of East Asia.41 And even in a monograph that more comfortably fits into the literature on world systems, William Borden wrote that “Balance of power considerations were paramount; the loss of Germany and Japan to the Soviets would irrevocably tip the balance in the Soviet favor.”42 In this rendition, one might see economic and military aid (to overcome the dollar gap) as moves to redress unfavorable trends in the balance of power rather than to buttress the world market system. Although this was not Borden’s intent, some of his findings might add credibility to the postrevisionist emphasis on geopolitics and threat perception. In analyses of US relations with East Asia, geopolitical factors have acquired a new saliency as historians have probed the policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations with the People’s Republic of China. Earlier views that American policy was dictated by domestic interests, known as “the China bloc,” and by ideological antipathy toward the Chinese communists have been replaced by closely textured analyses of the thinking and actions of Acheson and Dulles. The two historians most responsible for this reconsideration are Warren Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker. They show that the so-called “wedge strategy,” the desire to split Beijing from Moscow, was on Acheson’s mind from the outset.43 Although the Korean War and Chinese intervention narrowed the options subsequently available to US officials, Eisenhower and Dulles recognized the possibility of a Sino-Soviet

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split, thought that a tough stance against the PRC might accentuate strains in the communist bloc, and pondered the prospects of living in a world with two Chinas. 44 Tucker has presented considerable evidence showing that US officials contemplated more flexible policies, but few historians believe that the United States actually practiced a policy of accommodation. Gordon Chang, for example, maintains that US antipathy toward the PRC grew during the 1950s, even as Eisenhower and Dulles explored possibilities of détente with the Soviet Union.45 These analyses of the Eisenhower administration’s relations with the PRC highlight elements of pragmatism that earlier historians of the Eisenhower era did not see. Tucker’s work, for example, underscores elements of the “revisionist” approach to the Eisenhower years, but this type of revisionism should not be confused with the revisionist approaches to the history of the Cold War discussed earlier. Eisenhower revisionism stresses that the president was active, thoughtful, and manipulative. In fact, much of the recent writing on the Eisenhower era has centered on questions of whether he was in command, whether he knew what was going on, and whether he was wise. Most writers have come to agree that the president exerted decisive control over his administration’s foreign policies and that he was thoughtful, analytic, and intelligent. They do not agree that he carried out a wise set of policies.46 Aside from a number of sympathetic biographers, H.W.Brands has become one of the most prolific writers on the diplomacy of the Eisenhower era. In his stimulating book The Specter of Neutralism, Brands studies the response of the United States to neutralist and revolutionary nationalist regimes in Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt. Showing, for example, that Eisenhower and Dulles were willing to assist Tito’s communist government, Brands argues that the president and his advisers acted “in a remarkably non-ideological fashion.” Their diplomacy “reflected primarily a geopolitical interpretation of American strategic, military, diplomatic, and economic interests, and it demonstrated a shrewd weighing of the effects of the international balance of power of the particular activities of specific nonaligned countries.”47 The emphasis on geopolitics, power balances, and external stimuli gives a postrevisionist appearance to much of Brands’s work. He largely ignores the economic determinants of policy and fails to engage the world systems critique, while consciously posing an alternative to revisionist historians of the Cold War like Walter LaFeber, Richard Immerman, and Blanche Wiesen Cook, who had claimed that Eisenhower and Dulles were rigidly ideological, bent on fighting communism and revolutionary nationalism everywhere, and determined to retain open access to the world’s natural resources and markets. Although Brands does show that there was nuance and flexibility in the tactics of the Eisenhower administration, he has not persuaded most of his colleagues that there was also wisdom and consistency. Eisenhower was aware of the potency of nationalism in postwar international affairs, was restrained in his

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use of force, was committed to limit military spending, was interested in arms control and intent on avoiding global war. He was shrewd, learned from some of his mistakes, and came to see that government economic aid could enhance his policy goals. But he was never able to escape from the view that the United States was locked in a zero-sum game of power politics with the Soviet Union—so he supported covert actions to overthrow unfriendly governments in Guatemala and Iran, bolstered unpopular regimes like that of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and disregarded the immense build-up in nuclear armaments. Even Brands acknowledges the validity of some of these criticisms.48 But what factors served to inspire the ongoing Cold War during the 1950s? Big interpretive foreign policy books on the Eisenhower era, like those by Gaddis, the Kolkos, Hogan, and Cumings on the 1940s, do not yet exist. Instead we have penetrating collections of essays, first-rate biographies, and astute analyses of crisis decision-making.49 In some of these works we see Eisenhower and his aides demonstrating more and more concern with American credibility. The United States, they felt, had to show resolve in places like the Taiwan straits, Indochina and Lebanon, in order to bolster the confidence of wavering allies and in order to deter even more troublesome behavior from adventurous adversaries. This concern with credibility highlights how important perception and misperception became in the global competition with Soviet communism.50 Historians are increasingly interested in how American officials saw their adversaries and allies, how friends and foes saw Washington, and how US policymakers thought their actions would affect prospective policies elsewhere. In order to evoke behavior that complied with the wishes of the United States, Truman, Eisenhower, and their successors believed the United States had to be credible. Notions of credibility, therefore, are critical to understanding deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and crisis decision-making. But credibility was linked to interests as well as to threat perception. The important interpretive books on the Cold War have always tried to sort through this maze of complex interrelationships. Traditionalists, realists, and revisionists, as well as postrevisionists, corporatists and world systems historians have examined how US officials defined their fundamental interests; how they assessed the intentions of the adversary; how economics, geopolitics, public opinion, and ideology entered the policymaking equation; and how external pressures affected policy outcomes. And, although they still disagree on the question of primacy, one can see that historians who may be categorized as fitting into these different “schools” nevertheless borrow increasingly from one another and are influenced by one another’s work. Hence, in truth, the categories that are used in essays like this one tend to suggest more rigid definitions than exist in practice. In my own research on the Cold War I have found evidence that has forced me to integrate key elements from the different schools of interpretation.51 As I have indicated earlier in this essay, it seems to me that

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the revisionists were right in stressing that the Soviet Union’s initial postwar actions were limited. To acknowledge this is not to exonerate the Kremlin for its barbarous behavior at home, or on its periphery; it is simply to suggest that Stalin’s focus was on protecting his immediate borders and on thwarting the recreation of German and Japanese power. American officials did have a more expansive conception of their security and did hope to establish a world order compatible with their interests and values. But as persuasive as is the revisionist and world systems critique in these respects, I do not share their penchant to discount Washington’s preoccupation with Soviet strength. US officials were gravely worried about the Kremlin’s capacity to exploit postwar economic dislocation, socio-political turmoil, and revolutionary nationalism in order to further its own self-interest and its totalitarian rule at home and abroad. The Kolkos and Cumings err when they minimize American apprehensions about the Soviet Union and when they dwell primarily on economic and capitalist imperatives. My research suggests that Truman, Eisenhower, and their associates paid a great deal of attention to geopolitical configurations of power, as some realists and many postrevisionists argue. These policymakers were attuned to external stimuli, were aware of local rivalries, and, within certain limits, were subject to manipulation by weaker partners. But while acknowledging these strengths in the realist and postrevisionist literature, I do not always share their conclusions. What Truman, Eisenhower, and their advisers wanted was not a world of diversity but a world in which most nations accepted American values and comported themselves in ways that buttressed American interests. In other words, the United States wanted not a balance of power but a configuration of power in the international system that was preponderantly to America’s advantage. And in pursuing these goals, US policymakers did grasp how the world capitalist system functioned: they did seek to integrate core and periphery; they did establish linkages with the private sector at home and with elites abroad; they did use covert action and strategic superiority to buttress their diplomacy; they did believe that the configuration of power abroad would affect the political economy at home. But American diplomacy would not have assumed the characteristics it did and would not have garnered the resources and popular support it needed if it had not been designed to thwart a totalitarian adversary as well as to revive world capitalism—if it did not have, as its ultimate objective, a desire to foster free politics as well as free markets, liberalism as well as capitalism.

NOTES 1 Allen Louis Charles Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951, New York, 1983; Anne Deighton, The Impossible Dream: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War, Oxford, 1990. 2 Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954, New

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York, 1991; David Reynolds, “The Origins of the Cold War: The European Dimension, 1944–51,” Historical Journal, vol. 28, 1985, pp. 497–515; Josef Becker and Franz Knipping (eds), Power in Europe?: Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945–1950, Berlin, 1986. Sergei Goncharov, John W.Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partner: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, Stanford, Calif., 1994; Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc, Durham, N.C., 1986; Antony Polonsky, “Stalin and the Poles, 1941–47,” European Historical Quarterly, vol. 17, 1987, pp. 453–92. Roger Dingman, “The Diplomacy of Dependency: The Philippines and Peacemaking with Japan,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 27, 1986, pp. 307–21; Robert J.McMahon, “United States Cold War Strategy in South Asia: Making a Military Commitment to Pakistan, 1947–1954,” Journal of American History, vol.75, 1988, pp. 812–40. For an assessment of the debate between traditionalists and revisionists as it started to gain intensity, see Norman A.Graebner, “Cold War Origins and the Continuing Debate: A Review of Recent Literature,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 13, 1969, pp. 123–32. For key memoirs and diaries, see, for example, Harry S.Truman, Memoirs: 1945, Year of Decisions, New York, 1955 and Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946– 1952, New York, 1956; James F.Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, New York, 1947 and All in One Lifetime, New York, 1958; Dean G.Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department, New York, 1969; George F.Kennan, Memoirs, 1925– 1950, New York, 1967. On Kennan, see David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, New York, 1988; for influential traditional views, see Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr, “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 46, 1967, pp. 22–52; Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945–1950, New York, 1970. Adam Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II, New York, 1971; William Taubman, Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War, New York, 1982; Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War, New York, 1979. Bruce R.Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, Princeton, N.J., 1980. Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1946, New York, 1987, pp. 102–3. Randall B.Woods and Howard Jones, The Dawning of the Cold War, Athens, Ga, 1991, p. 30. John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, 7th ed., New York, 1977, p. 29; Norman A.Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy: American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975, 2nd ed., New York, 1977. Barton J.Bernstein (ed.), Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, Chicago, 1970; Lloyd C.Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941–1949, Chicago, 1970; Thomas G.Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War, Baltimore, Md, 1973; Bruce Kuklick, American Policy and the Division of Germany: The Clash with Russia over Reparations, Ithaca, N.Y., 1972; Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina, 1942–45,” American Historical Review, vol. 80, 1975, pp. 1277–95. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, New York, 1965. Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance, New York, 1977; Barton J.Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941–1945: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 90, 1975, pp. 23–69. William O.McCagg, Stalin Embattled, 1943–1948, Detroit, Mich., 1978; Gavriel

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19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

29 30

31

Melvyn P.Leffler D.Ra’anan, International Policy Formulation in the USSR: Factional “Debates” During the Zhadonovschina, Hamden, Conn., 1983; Robert Slusser, Soviet Economic Policy in Postwar Germany, New York, 1953. Paolo Spriano, Stalin and the European Communists, London, 1985; Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, New York, 1975. Michael MccGwire, “The Genesis of Soviet Threat Perception,” Washington, 1987; Charles B.McLane, Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia: An Exploration of Eastern Policy under Lenin and Stalin, Princeton, N.J., 1966; Steven I.Levine, “Breakthrough to the East: Soviet Asian Policy in the 1950s,” in Warren I.Cohen and Akira Iriye (eds), The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960, New York, 1990, pp. 296–316. See the reviews of the memoirs by Novikov and Molotov, in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, vol. 1,1992, pp. 16–22; Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, Boston, 1990, pp. 69, 100–1; Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs, New York, 1989, pp. 107–12, 138. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, New York, 1991, pp. 501 and 531. Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54, New York, 1972. The quotations are on pages 31, 11, 8, and 15. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, New York, 1972. The quotation is on p. 358. Gaddis, The United States, p. 359. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York, 1982, pp. 201, 204; for the postrevisionist critique, see also Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Thesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, vol. 7, 1983, pp. 171–90. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 23, 1986, pp. 263–77; The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947, New York, 1975; and America, Scandinavia, and the Cold War, 1945–1949, New York, 1980. Fraser Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War, New York, 1986. Wall, United States and the Making of Postwar France; James E.Miller, The United States and Italy: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986; Bullock, Bevin, Foreign Secretary, Alan S.Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951, Berkeley, Calif., 1984; Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan, 1947–1965, New York, 1994. Ernest May, The Truman Administration and China, 1945–1949, Philadelphia, Pa, 1975; “The American Commitment to Germany, 1949–1955,” Diplomatic History, vol. 13, 1989, pp. 431–60. David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History, vol. 66, 1979, pp. 62–87; “Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security, vol. 7, 1983, pp. 3–71. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York, 1988. Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill”; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, Princeton, N.J., 1991; Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War,” International Security, vol. 13, 1988/9, pp. 50–91; Robert Wampler, “Nuclear Learning and Nuclear Teaching: The Eisenhower Administration, Nuclear Weapons and NATO Strategy, 1953–1960” (unpublished paper), 1992. Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 167–8.

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41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

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Peter L.Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991; McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery. Michael J.Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, New York, 1987, pp. 2–3. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, p. 32. Thomas A.Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J.McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany, Cambridge, Mass., 1991. John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan, Stanford, Calif., 1976; Timothy P.Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Westport, Conn., 1981. Geir Lundestad, The American “Empire” and Other Studies of US Foreign Policy in a Comparative Perspective, New York, 1990; Reynolds, “Origins of the Cold War.” Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, Princeton, N.J., 1992, pp. 38 and 36. Cumings, The Roaring of the Cataract, p. 20; see also Thomas J.McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Baltimore, Md, 1989. William S.Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955, Madison, Wis., 1984; Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia, Ithaca, N.Y., 1987. Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York, 1985. Borden, Pacific Alliance, p. 11. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, New York, 1983; Warren I.Cohen, “Acheson, His Advisors, and China, 1949–1950,” in Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), The Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947–1950, New York, 1980, pp. 13–52. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, “A House Divided: The United States, the Department of State, and China,” in Cohen and Iriye (eds), Great Powers in East Asia, pp. 35–62. Gordon H.Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1952, Stanford, Calif., 1990, pp. 143–217. For an excellent review of the literature, see Stephen Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism: A Decade of Scholarship,” Diplomatic History, vol. 17, 1993, pp. 97–115. H.W.Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, New York, 1988. These generalizations are based on Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Startling Reappraisal of the Eisenhower Presidency, New York, 1980; Burton I.Kaufman, Trade & Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961, Baltimore, Md, 1982; Robert J.McMahon, “Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism: A Critique of the Revisionists,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 101, 1986, pp. 453–73; H.W. Brands, “The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National insecurity State,” American Historical Review, vol. 94, 1989, pp. 963–89; David L.Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–61, New York, 1991. See, for example, Richard H.Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, Princeton, N.J., 1989; Richard A.Melanson and David Mayers (eds), Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the 7950’s, Urbana, III., 1987; Stephen E.Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, New York, 1984; Chester J.Pach and Elmo R.Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D.Elsenhower,

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Lawrence, Kan., 1991; Melanie Billings-Yun, Decision Against War: Eisenhower and Dien Bien Phu, 1954, New York, 1988. 50 Robert J.McMahon, “Credibility and World Power,” Diplomatic History, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 455–71. 51 Melvyn P.Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford, Calif., 1992.

8

From Kennedy to Nixon: the end of consensus Russell D.Buhite

In the first volume of his insightful Democracy in America, written in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “it seems as if all the minds of Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they follow the same route.”1 Over the following century there were a great many occasions on which American minds did not pursue the same route; but during World War II and the first twenty years of the Cold War a remarkable consensus once again emerged: general agreement about American foreign policy. President Franklin D.Roosevelt was able to lead the United States through its most popular war because the overwhelming majority of the American people profoundly believed that the nation was fighting for vital interests—territorial, economic, political—as well as for ideals of universal validity. Among these ideals were not only the “truths” and rights incorporated in the Declaration of Independence and the first ten amendments of the American constitution, but basic human values as well. The onset of the Cold War brought a continuation of the consensus. Just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese military leadership had posed palpable threats to American ideals and interests so too, people thought, did Josef Stalin—a brutal tyrant who had killed millions of his compatriots in the Soviet Union: the kulaks who stood in the way of collectivized agriculture; military officers who might threaten his internal hegemony; loyal party members and former close associates who knew of his crimes; the executioners; the executioners of the executioners; etc., etc. He imprisoned millions of others out of paranoid fear or irrational whim. He also presided over a hostile, messianic ideology that promoted revolution in other nations and rejected many of the norms of international behavior. To most Americans and, not insignificantly, most Europeans, Stalin’s regime was as ruthless, as dictatorial, as expansionist, as Hitler’s. To many, the argument that the Soviets had achieved a legitimate right to extend their empire over Eastern Europe because they had carried the heaviest burden in the defeat of Germany was like saying that a Mafia gangster who served the public good by killing a murderous rival suddenly became deserving of recognition and standing in the larger community. Stalin’s death in 1953 and

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events of the late 1950s brought hope for an improved relationship but did not alter the basic presumption. If anything, the election of John F.Kennedy in 1960 signaled a clarion call to take up more vigorously the challenge against the Soviet Union and its ally, the People’s Republic of China. Although historians and political scientists are in general agreement that public opinion played an extraordinary role in defining American foreign policy in the 1960s—for part of the decade the World War II/Cold War consensus and for the remainder skepticism about American international commitments—they are not in accord in interpreting some of the most important events of the era. Both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, for example, have generated heated historiographical controversies. This essay will address those controversies and others, but, on the assumption that students are not attracted to densely historiographical essays, will do so while focusing on the nexus of opinion and policy decision in the administrations of Kennedy, Lyndon B.Johnson, and Richard M.Nixon. Public opinion is not an easy phenomenon for the diplomatic historian to assess. It is difficult to define, hard to measure, and, because archival evidence is usually inadequate, nearly impossible to gauge in its impact on policymakers. It is best understood if broken down into its major components: opinion-makers, among whom are editors of major newspapers, prominent journalists, television commentators, government consultants and officials, leading businessmen and an occasional scholar or other professional; an attentive or interested public, which would consist of 20 to 30 per cent of the American people, depending on the issue; and mass opinion, which will be 70 to 80 per cent of the people who are generally uninterested in foreign policy except on major issues of war and peace. The opinion-makers shape opinion and often policy itself through their access to the media and to policymakers. The attentive public may influence policy in any number of ways, including personal contact with government officials or through organizations formed for that purpose. Mass opinion usually makes an impact through polls and elections. Presidents and other top policymakers are usually much more concerned about and give more attention to the elites than to mass opinion, except in the presence of a presidential election.2 In the period down through the early stages of the Vietnam War the vast majority of Americans, as polled in George Gallup’s interviews, saw foreign affairs generally and communism specifically as the most important problems that the United States faced. Both the attentive and the mass publics supported America’s international behavior, the idea of a strong US military establishment, and those political figures, both Democrats and Republicans, who endorsed the standard cold-war line. Politicians who spoke up against US policies did not fare well. The historian will search in vain for any clear demarcation between liberal and conservative positions on basic foreign policy matters until after the major US build-up in Vietnam.3 That the World War II/Cold War consensus broke down after the mid-1960s is evident in the primary concerns of Americans from that time onward. Polls

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have shown that far fewer Americans identified foreign policy issues as being of overriding importance and far fewer members of the mass public believed that the United States should maintain the range of international commitments incurred in the previous twenty years. More importantly for this essay, a large segment of the attentive public came to regard as misguided American political, economic, and, especially, military intervention in the Third World.4 Convinced that the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower had not only allowed the nation’s defenses to slip but had failed the test of competition in the developing world, John F.Kennedy brought to the presidency a commitment to global involvement on a grand scale. “We will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe,” Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “to assure the survival and success of liberty.” And he brought with him to Washington a group of intelligent and confident advisers—“action intellectuals”—who would help fashion his new activist policies. Among the most prominent of these “action intellectuals” were McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean who became National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, an MIT professor who became head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, and Robert McNamara, former president of the Ford Motor Company who became Secretary of Defense. That these men and Kennedy’s brother, Robert, who became Attorney General, would overshadow Secretary of State Dean Rusk in the fashioning of policy was always the intention of the new president, although Rusk’s credentials as Rhodes scholar, college professor, military officer, former Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in the Truman administration and as head of the Rockefeller Foundation, were truly impressive. Although President Kennedy’s team became interested in third-world areas from Indochina to the Congo, it was in Latin America that they chose to challenge most forcefully the perceived communist threat. Their strategy was multi-faceted: economic development fostered through the Alliance for Progress, in which the United States would expend $20 billion to help Latin American nations modernize their economies—a plan usually cited as a failure but one that achieved some successes;5 an educational effort carried forward through the Peace Corps in which young men and women would teach Latin Americans some basic technical skills; and military action through which the United States would seek to stabilize friendly governments, quell guerrilla uprisings and destabilize or overthrow unfriendly regimes. No regime seemed more unfriendly than that of Fidel Castro in Cuba and none received as much attention from the Kennedy administration. Kennedy believed that both strategic necessity and American public opinion required that he get rid of the Castro government, which, by January 1961, had become a Soviet client. Accordingly, in that same month he gave his approval to a CIA plan begun under the Eisenhower administration, in which some fifteen hundred Cuban exiles trained in Florida and in Guatemala would land at the

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Bay of Pigs on the coast of Matanzas province, draw support from Cubans disaffected with Castro and overthrow his government. A fiasco of embarrassing dimensions, the operation failed when the men were captured within forty-eight hours of their landing because the hoped-for Cuban uprising did not occur and Kennedy refused to authorize air power. To compound the embarrassment for the new administration, Kennedy then had to pay a $10 million ransom to retrieve the invaders. Worried about the administration’s credibility both at home and abroad, the Kennedy team over the next eighteen months redoubled its efforts to dispose of Castro. In October 1961 Kennedy authorized contingency plans for an invasion of Cuba and then, in November, approved the establishment of Operation Mongoose, the largest covert operation undertaken up to that time—an operation that would receive funding in the amount of $50 million a year and the participation of over four hundred CIA officers. Kennedy’s plans for overthrowing Castro were thus two-dimensional: a military invasion if such action were required to get the job done and a series of plots to murder the Cuban dictator. The latter included agents giving him poison cigars, planting exploding sea shells in his favorite snorkeling area, and arranging with US mobsters to send “hit teams” to Havana. Many of these plans were extensions of secret operations already begun in the Eisenhower administration. One such plan had a female CIA operative, of whom Castro had already had carnal knowledge, insinuate herself into his bedroom and then, at an appropriate time, slip poison pellets into his drink—a plan that failed because the young woman had hidden these pellets in her cold cream, where they melted and became useless.6 Possibly to forestall an American invasion, assuming some Soviet knowledge of Kennedy administration plans and plots but almost certainly to redress the Soviet Union’s enormous inferiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles, Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided in the spring of 1962 to place Soviet medium and intermediate range missiles in Cuba. Given its failure at the Bay of Pigs and its inability to respond to the Soviets’ building of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1961, not to mention the roughing-up Kennedy received from Khrushchev at the Vienna Conference of June 1961, the Kennedy administration held deep-seated fears of appearing inadequate in view of the prevailing consensus. The existence of missiles in Cuba was a challenge that Kennedy, for several reasons, not least of which was domestic political considerations, simply could not refuse. Since 1962 was a Congressional election year and the Republicans, led by Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, had begun making charges as early as September about administration neglect of possible nuclear missiles in Cuba, Kennedy had to act as soon as he had hard evidence of their existence. Imagery intelligence quickly confirmed their presence to the president after U-2 air reconnaissance overflights of Cuba on 14 and 15 October. Kennedy’s initial move was to appoint a high-powered panel of advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (Ex Comm), to

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consider various policies that would result in the removal of the Soviet missiles. Among the options considered were private appeals to the Cuban and Soviet governments, taking the matter to the United Nations, a US air strike followed by an invasion, and a blockade or quarantine of arms shipments to the island. Leading military members of the Ex Comm, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor and the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis Lemay, among others, strongly urged the use of an air strike, but Kennedy was attracted to the idea endorsed by his brother Robert for a blockade—on the assumption that it left other options open. On 22 October, Kennedy went on national television to announce the presence of the missiles and the decision to impose the quarantine, in support of which he quickly placed 180 US warships in the Caribbean, B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear bombs in the air and US ground forces on high alert. What followed was a week filled with almost unbearable tension for both policymakers and world opinion. “The smell of burning,” Khrushchev said, “hung in the air.” When, on 24 October, the Soviet ships bound for Cuba stopped dead in the water short of the blockade line, a ray of hope appeared for a peaceful resolution of the crisis—hope that was enhanced when a KGB agent in Washington, Alexsandr Fomin, contacted ABC news reporter John Scali on 26 October with a proposal that the two sides conclude a deal in which the United States would promise not to invade the island in return for Soviet withdrawal of the missiles. On the following day, when Khrushchev seemed to raise the stakes by insisting on US removal of its missiles from Turkey as well, Kennedy came back, using his brother Robert as envoy to the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, with the proposal that the United States would promise not to invade Cuba if the missiles were withdrawn and would later take US missiles out of Turkey—an action that it was going to take anyway because of the obsolescence of these missiles. This part of the deal, Robert Kennedy reported, would have to remain secret. Khrushchev agreed, and the crisis ended on 27 October. A series of meetings attended by many of those who had participated in the events, as well as by scholars who had studied the crisis, at Harvard University in October 1987, in Moscow in January 1989, and in Havana in January 1992 has revealed that the crisis was even more dangerous than people thought at the time. American officials in October 1962 assumed that the Soviets had stationed between 12,000 and 16,000 military personnel in Cuba; there were actually about 42,000. The Soviets had built twenty-four launchers for 1020 nautical-mile missiles and had loaded these missiles with nuclear warheads, the latter a fact not known by US officials during the crisis. They had built sixteen launchers for 2200 nautical-mile missiles but these missiles were cut off by the US quarantine. Most disturbing is the revelation that the Soviets had provided their forces in Cuba with six tactical rocket launchers and nine tactical nuclear warheads to use in the event of an American invasion, and that they had given the Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, authority to fire these missiles at his discretion. Moreover, it is now known that the

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KGB agent, Fomin, whose démarche was seen at the time as coming from Khrushchev, was actually acting on his own.7 Given the danger inherent in a showdown of this nature, Kennedy’s motives for abjuring private diplomacy in favor of a public ultimatum deserve further scrutiny. Among his motives were a desire to convince the Soviets that aggression did not pay, to show that the United States was a credible actor on the world stage, and to address the strategic threat posed by the existence of these missiles only ninety miles from American soil. One other possible motive, concern about domestic politics and American public opinion, remains a matter of some contention—indeed it has emerged as the focus of historiographical controversy. Kennedy’s defenders, most notably Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Elie Abel, Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, David Welch, and James Blight, have written books and articles praising the president’s measured, unemotional approach to the problem of the missiles. They argue that Kennedy was motivated by strategic concerns and the need to demonstrate American resolve both to the Soviets and to the larger international community, and that he was not motivated by concerns with US politics. Sorensen has argued that Kennedy and his advisers at the time believed the blockade would adversely affect the administration’s political standing, while Welch and Blight have pointed out that Kennedy was prepared, as a last resort, to arrange a public trade of the US missiles in Turkey for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba—hardly a move designed to gain political points. Bundy and others claim that the deliberations of the Ex Comm betray no evidence of worry about domestic politics.8 Revisionists have interpreted Kennedy’s motives in a diametrically opposite way. I.F.Stone has argued that the reasons Kennedy opted for a confrontation were partly to assuage his “inferiority complex,” partly to prove his machismo, and mainly to strike a political blow before the November elections. Quiet diplomacy, Stone argues, would have led to protracted negotiations going well beyond November and would not have provided the drama that the president required. Another revisionist, Ronald Steel, has criticized Kennedy’s obsessional concern with the removal of the missiles before election day and has argued that a private back channel overture to Khrushchev would have terminated the crisis without fanfare. Barton Bernstein has advanced a more inclusive interpretation but likewise stresses Kennedy’s attention to his domestic political constituency.9 Recent scholarship, particularly an article by Richard Ned Lebow in the fall 1990 issue of Diplomatic History, while noting the complexity of Kennedy’s motives, demonstrates that domestic politics and American public opinion—opinion-makers, the attentive public and mass opinion—surely played a part in his decisions. Because Kennedy had used the Cuban issue in the campaign against Richard Nixon, charging that the Republicans had been derelict for allowing the existence of a communist regime in the Caribbean, he could not have it appear that he, the tough candidate, would permit the

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establishment of a Soviet military base in Cuba. As Roger Hilsman, a Kennedy adviser, put it: “President Kennedy and his administration were peculiarly vulnerable on Cuba.”10 According to Hilsman, Kennedy was mainly concerned with the opinion of the elites, the opinion-makers, if he did not reverse the Soviet move: he would be “faced with a revolt from the military, from the hardliners in other departments, both State and CIA, from not only Republicans on Capitol Hill but some Democrats, too.”11 Remarks by John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy’s ambassador to India, reinforce the Hilsman view: “The political needs of the Kennedy administration,” Galbraith said of the Soviet missiles, “urged it to take almost any risk to get them out.”12 To Robert McNamara’s comment in the midst of the crisis that “I don’t think there is a military problem here… This, this is a domestic political problem,” President Kennedy added his observation that if he had not acted, “I would have been impeached.”13 Whether he actually feared impeachment or was simply rationalizing his policy of confrontation, Kennedy certainly had serious concerns about the popular perception of his ability to perform adequately in the arena of the Cold War. Fortunately, in this instance, to quote Secretary of State Rusk, “the other fellow blinked” and Kennedy emerged from the crisis appearing strong and courageous. Although the United States would never show assiduous restraint toward foreign intervention or foreign ideology in its sphere of influence, Kennedy’s policy in the Third World, where possible, combined anti-communism with the promotion of democratic principles and economic stability; indeed, the Kennedy administration hoped that liberal democratic nation-building would prove a successful alternative to communism in all of the developing world, including Latin America. Thus, when citizens of the Dominican Republic in 1961 assassinated the execrable dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had plundered and misgoverned the country since 1931, Kennedy hastened to support his democratically elected successor, Juan Bosch, an anti-communist liberal, a poet and philosopher. When Bosch, who had been in exile for over twenty-five years, demonstrated a greater capacity to inflame than to govern and was himself removed from power in a military coup after only seven months in office, Kennedy did not like the result but accepted it. Kennedy’s successor in the presidency, Lyndon B.Johnson, seemed to like the result, fearing the prospect of another Castro regime in the Caribbean. In any event, because he saw Juan Bosch as a woolly-headed, rather impractical intellectual, Johnson supported the regime of Donald Reid Cabral. Another coup, launched on 24 April 1965 by followers of Bosch, frightened Johnson because they included some communists and admirers of Fidel Castro; four days later the president sent in the marines. “The last thing we want to have happen is a communist takeover in that country,” Johnson proclaimed to a group of his advisers meeting at the White House just before the landing of a large American force.14 At first announcing that the purpose of the intervention was to protect American nationals, Johnson sent only a small contingent of men, but as it became clear to him that assuring a pro-

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American outcome in that chaotic country would take a much greater effort, he dispatched over 22,000 troops. Not an incidental factor in his decision was his perception that the overwhelming majority of Americans shared his aversion to another communist regime in the Caribbean and would support the intervention—and he was right. The Organization of American States, which Johnson contemptuously dismissed as being so inept that it couldn’t “pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel,” also tepidly endorsed the action. Occurring after the beginning of the major US build-up in Vietnam, the Dominican intervention represented a transitional event in the 1960s from the World War II/Cold War consensus to the new skepticism about American international behavior. Opinion-makers, as demonstrated in the editorials of three leading American newspapers, warmly endorsed Johnson’s decision to intervene. The New York Times stated that “there was a solid reason for the United States to put a marine landing force into Santo Domingo. The reason was to protect Americans and to evacuate those who desire to leave.” Later, the Times noted that Johnson’s determination not “to see another communist state established in this hemisphere will command national support.” The Washington Post agreed: “the United States does not want to see the Dominican Republic become another communist Cuba.” As might have been expected, the Chicago Tribune did not hesitate to interpret the Dominican rebellion as “animated by communist elements” against whom President Johnson had to act. Through most of the period of the military intervention itself, few opponents came forward in either political party or in any particular area of American life, although one notable exception was Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon who, foreshadowing the later opposition on Vietnam, charged that the United States had become “military power drunk.” At least until the final phase of the American operation, when negotiations were conducted to establish a new Dominican government and some criticism surfaced—some of which came from the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J.William Fulbright—Johnson enjoyed nearly the same level of support that Kennedy had received during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A part of the reason for this is that Johnson helped to mold opinion by vigorously promoting his policy in speaking engagements to a wide array of professional organizations around the country.15 That Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency on 22 November 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy, shared the world view of almost every other policymaker of his generation seems abundantly clear: that appeasement did not pay; that America’s primary interest lay in containing the expansionist aspirations of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and in successfully competing for influence in the developing world. Less interested in “nation-building” than in stopping communism, his approach to international problems tended to be more overtly military than Kennedy’s had been, although he was guided by many of Kennedy’s advisers and assumed he was continuing his predecessor’s programs. Among “the best and the

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brightest” who stayed on with Johnson were Robert McNamara, who remained as Secretary of Defense until differences over Vietnam led to his resignation in 1968; McGeorge Bundy, who served as National Security Adviser until 1966; Walt Rostow, who moved from the State Department to take over Bundy’s post; and Dean Rusk, who, as Secretary of State, gained influence in policy formation under Johnson. In addition to these influential advisers were many secondechelon players who helped to define Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Johnson inherited a problem in Vietnam that went back far beyond the administration of his immediate predecessor. A French colony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and the site of bitter fighting between indigenous nationalists and French imperialists between 1945 and 1954, Vietnam became a direct object of cold-war contention during the Eisenhower administration, when the United States supported a non-communist regime south of the 17th parallel, thereby obstructing unification of the country under the communist government of the north. The region received greater American attention in the late 1950s and early 1960s because the government in Hanoi, frustrated over its failure to achieve domination of the whole country through peaceful means, began an uprising against the troubled, increasingly unpopular, American-sponsored government of President Ngo Dinh Diem in the south. By the time of Kennedy’s death in 1963 the conflict had reached a critical stage, wherein the United States had two basic options: to allow events to take their course, which would probably mean communist control of all of Vietnam, or to increase assistance to the south. On 2 October 1963, the date of the return from a week-long visit to Vietnam by two of his most trusted advisers, General Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara, both of whom came back convinced of the need to save South Vietnam, President Kennedy issued a statement asserting that “the security of South Vietnam is a major interest of the United States.”16 In 1961 the United States had 948 troops in Vietnam, along with a handful of CIA personnel who were performing a variety of cloak-and-dagger activities to help the Diem government cope with the National Liberation Front—or “Vietcong” as it was labeled by President Diem to denote its communist affiliation. Kennedy also continued to provide technical and financial assistance to the South Vietnamese in accordance with his assessment of American interests. In addition to giving the South Vietnamese lessons in political science and urging democratic reform, the Kennedy administration markedly increased the number of American military forces in Vietnam during 1962–3: by the middle of 1962 the number was up to 5,000; by the end of the year it was 11,000; by the time Johnson succeeded to the presidency there were over 16,000, all of them functioning as “advisers.” Diem, whose overthrow on 1 November 1963 had been encouraged by the United States in the hope of producing a stronger government, was followed by a series of leaders, which weakened rather than strengthened the chances of resisting communist pressures.

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Informing the Vietnam policies of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the early and mid-1960s were assessments of the People’s Republic of China as a peculiarly virulent and aggressive regime, and an interpretation of the Asian theater of World War II that portrayed Southeast Asia as having been of critical importance to the Allied nations. If a vital interest of the United States in the 1940s had been that no hostile power should dominate a large part of Asia and the Pacific, and if it had been necessary to wage a war partly to prevent the Japanese from establishing control of Southeast Asia, American officials reasoned that it was no less important in the 1960s to guarantee access to that region by the United States and its allies. An expansionist China, using one means or another to dominate that area, represented a threat at least as critical to American interests as the one posed earlier by Japan. Containing China thus became the central focus of American policy in Vietnam during the early phases of the increased US involvement in Southeast Asia.17 China had become the bête noire of American policymakers for a variety of reasons. As a former battlefield enemy in Korea, ally of the Soviet Union and bitter opponent of US policies in East Asia, China seemed determined to expand its influence by creating a series of client states in the region. American officials interpreted, in the darkest terms, such Chinese moves as the annexation of Tibet and the attack on India, not to mention the bombarding of the offshore islands in 1954–5 and 1958. President Kennedy came to the conclusion that the sobering effect of the Cuban Missile Crisis had created a favorable climate for a Soviet-American understanding to avoid mutual destruction. He saw little hope for such an understanding with China; indeed, he saw China as the more dangerous of the two cold-war enemies facing the United States. With their development of the atomic bomb in 1964, the Chinese leadership seemed capable of making good on their belligerent pronouncements about fostering wars of national liberation in Southeast Asia. Using the bomb for blackmail, they could, moreover, frighten the political leaders of Southeast Asia into closer association with China. The fact that all southeast Asian nations possessed very large Chinese populations made this close association seem all the more likely. In the case of Vietnam itself, much of which had been part of China until the tenth century, and with which it now shared a frontier, it seemed logical that China would seek domination or control. If all of Vietnam became communist, the communization of the rest of Southeast Asia, under Chinese direction, would become easier to achieve. Chinese involvement in the uprising against the government of Indonesia in the fall of 1965, though badly timed and a colossal failure, tended to confirm American assessments of Chinese intentions. A part of the conventional wisdom influencing American policy was the “domino” theory, or some variation thereof, which was first enunciated by President Elsenhower. If Vietnam fell to communism, other states in Southeast Asia would surely fall in turn, like dominoes, until all of the region, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and possibly New Zealand and

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Australia, had been lost. That such a development would prove inimical to American interests seemed axiomatic to US officials, not only because Americans would be denied access to an area rich in natural resources, but the major trade routes and sea lanes in that part of the world would also become inaccessible. All this region, it was assumed, would become closely associated with the People’s Republic of China. Two other concerns suffused American policy in the Kennedy-Johnson years: that Vietnam had considerable intrinsic importance and that the United States must show its resolve and its capacity to combat “wars of national liberation.” Vietnam possessed sufficient quantities of manganese, tungsten, chromium, phosphate, tin, coal, zinc, rubber, rice and various exotic woods to make it a valuable prize in the Cold War. For nearly a century the French had reaped enormous profits from this rich but unfortunate country. If the United States and its allies did not require these materials for their own needs, it was nonetheless important to deny them to their enemies. Wars of national liberation, in which communist insurgents carried on guerrilla activity to disrupt the normal processes of life and issued propaganda to win over poverty-ridden peasants, presented a challenge that American officials believed they could not ignore. Developing countries could slide into the communist orbit, adding to the overall strength of China and the Soviet Union, just as decisively through “wars of national liberation” as through conventional wars of conquest. It was necessary that the United States demonstrate the futility of such a war in Vietnam, otherwise countless other wars of this type would occur. If policymakers saw Vietnam as representing a valuable interest of the United States they were no less influenced by the other part of the prevailing consensus in their interpretation of events in that country. The Vietcong regularly displayed insufficient sensitivity to human values in their brutal murders and kidnapping of civilians in the south; and the regime in the north, while holding no brief for American democratic ideals, aggressively attempted to impose its dictatorial system on the people of the south. “Just like FOR and Hitler, just like Wilson and the Kaiser,” Lyndon Johnson said, it was necessary “to quarantine aggressors over there.”18 Because the communists made huge gains in 1964, President Johnson had either to increase American assistance or suffer the acute embarrassment associated with having “lost” another Asian country. The Republican candidate for the presidency, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, advocated taking the war to North Vietnam and criticized administration policy as too soft and conciliatory. Although Johnson ridiculed Goldwater as a warmonger, he began to pursue secretly a number of the very policies advocated by Goldwater—to the point that within a year he had appropriated and implemented nearly every program recommended by his Republican opponent. He increased the number of US advisers to about 23,000 by the end of 1964, began US air strikes in Laos, had the CIA infiltrate sabotage units into North Vietnam and increased American economic aid to the south. Then,

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in early August 1964, he used the issue of North Vietnamese torpedo boat attacks on the US destroyer Maddox ten miles off the North Vietnamese coast to secure Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—a measure passed 466–0 in the House and 88–2 in the Senate—that authorized the president to “take all necessary measures to repel armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”19 Accepting this as a sort of declaration of war, over the next three and onehalf years Johnson took very extensive measures indeed. In response to a Vietcong attack on the US air base at Pleiku in early February 1965 and the killing of several American airmen, Johnson initiated air attacks on North Vietnam, attacks that soon became a campaign under the code name “Operation Rolling Thunder.” Within a few months Johnson had sent 80,000 men to South Vietnam; by early 1969 the United States had 542,000 troops there engaged in the longest, most expensive and one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in American history—a war that dragged on inconclusively, a war in which the United States seemed to lose sight of the proper connection between means and ends, a war inconsistent with American ideals, and a war that became increasingly unpopular with the American people. A quick survey of the two types of opinion, mass and elite, indicates how minds changed during the course of the war. In 1964 and 1965, fully twothirds of the American people stated that they paid no attention to the Vietnam question, and a high percentage could not locate the country on a map. During the initial build-up of 1965 and early 1966 a large majority of the American people supported administration policy and, while criticism and disaffection began to grow into 1967, most Americans preferred escalation to de-escalation or withdrawal. In other words, more people voiced dissatisfaction with the war because the United States was not taking strong enough steps to win it than objected to the intervention itself. Between 1968 and 1970 objections increased geometrically: by September 1970 over 55 per cent of mass opinion favored withdrawal from the war.20 Elite sentiment either paralleled or moved ahead of mass sentiment. At the end of 1965, J.William Fulbright of Arkansas, ardent anti-communist, supporter of the prevailing foreign policy consensus and backer of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, came out against the war. Other key political figures in both political parties followed suit: on the Democratic side were, among others, Senators Frank Church of Idaho, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, George McGovern of South Dakota, Robert Kennedy of New York and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts; among Republicans speaking out against the conflict by 1968 were Senators John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, Thruston Morton of Kentucky, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Charles Goodell of New York, Jacob Javits of New York and Paul “Pete” McClosky of California. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1968, also began to question the wisdom of the debilitating US involvement in Southeast Asia. Other elites in a variety of professions, especially journalists and academics, came to the forefront of the antiwar movement.

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Feelings about Vietnam were becoming so intense that when, on 23 January 1968, the North Koreans seized the US electronic intelligence vessel, the USS Pueblo, operating in international waters off the North Korean coast, the response in Congress and among the public was remarkably quiescent. The Vietnam involvement had created such general skepticism about American policy that a great many Americans assumed that the Pueblo had violated Korean waters. Even such hawks as Senator John Stennis of Mississippi warned against “rash overreaction,” while Senator Fulbright spoke contemptuously of the Pueblo mission as “imprudent” and “stupid.” A Harris poll showed that nearly 60 per cent of the American people favored a peaceful resolution of the crisis and negotiation rather than military action toward securing the return of the crew. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal cautioned that the United States should avoid another war at nearly whatever cost.21 Reaction to the Pueblo seizure was but one indication of the change in the national mood. On 30 January, as US officials contemplated what to do about the Pueblo incident, the North Vietnamese launched the so-called Tet Offensive, which had a devastating psychological impact on the nation. A massive military undertaking that included attacks on thirty-six South Vietnamese cities and led to fighting within the US embassy compound in Saigon, the North Vietnamese action, though extremely costly for them militarily, profoundly undermined the administration’s promises of a successful conclusion to the war and further eroded public confidence. Indeed, the questioning of the war after Tet led to a breakdown in public civility, which further exacerbated the bitter divisions that already existed within the United States—and this began to take its toll on US policymakers in early 1968 and eventually contributed to a major policy reversal. Two other developments stand out as notable in the policy reversal: a request by General William C.Westmorland, Commander of US forces in Vietnam, in the wake of Tet, for 206,000 additional American troops; and a task force study organized by the new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, which led him to oppose the conflict. Clifford’s task force discussions—in which a number of his subordinates, most notably Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke, counselled against further escalation—convinced him that Westmoreland’s request should not be fulfilled. Clifford now urged the president to negotiate an end to American involvement. As an old friend and longtime supporter of the war, Clifford could influence Johnson as few others could do; Johnson was profoundly shaken by this defection, which contributed significantly to his announcement on 31 March that he would not seek re-election to the presidency and that he would pursue a negotiated peace. When Richard Nixon succeeded Lyndon Johnson after defeating the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, in the troubled presidential election of 1968, he did so with a definite set of predispositions about the place of Vietnam in the larger context of American foreign policy.

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As an old hard-line anti-communist, but as a greater proponent of realpolitik than he was of upholding principles, Nixon planned to implement a set of policies predicated less on ideology than on practical considerations of American interest. He and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and author of books on the nineteenth-century European balance of power as well as on the impact of nuclear weapons on American foreign policy, believed that the United States had to terminate its involvement in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger believed that the war was too costly, in terms of American lives and money, that it limited the nation’s ability to act in other areas that were of greater importance, and that it was tearing at the fabric of American life in a way that undermined domestic support of US foreign policy as a whole. A key to understanding the Nixon-Kissinger approach to Vietnam is that, while they wished to extricate the United States from that seemingly interminable war, they were determined to avoid the appearance of losing it. They hoped to engineer the withdrawal of US forces while a non-communist government remained in power in the south—at least for a decent interval. It is important to note that by 1968 a prime objective of the United States was, as Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton put it, “to avoid the harmful appearances” that would result if the United States failed to demonstrate its resolve.22 What this meant in practice was that the credibility factor had begun to dominate American policy by the time Nixon came to office; and, unfortunately, it continued to dominate policy throughout his first term. That an intangible like “credibility” became the primary concern of the US government is hardly surprising in view of developments affecting China in the late 1960s. The Chinese convulsion known as the Cultural Revolution, which was perpetrated by Chairman Mao Tse-tung, his wife, and a coterie of officials around them, had so enfeebled that nation, so isolated it internationally, that it could not endanger Southeast Asia—if indeed it had ever intended to do so. Nixon, long a vigorous defender of the Nationalists on Taiwan, began a series of steps that he expected to have a positive effect on the Chinese leadership: withdrawal of the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan strait, use of the term “People’s Republic of China” instead of “Mainland China,” lifting of trade restrictions, and the initiation of a variety of cultural exchanges. Because the Chinese needed the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, they were responsive. In April 1971 they invited an American table tennis team to visit China for a series of matches; in July they asked Kissinger to come to Peking (Beijing) to begin the normalization of relations; and in February 1972 the world witnessed something it had not expected to see, given the previous twenty-three years of Sino-American hostility: the president of the United States drinking mao-tai toasts with his Chinese hosts in Peking while a Chinese band played “America the Beautiful.” This trip facilitated a new beginning, in everything but name, of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

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To complement his opening to China, Nixon began a policy of détente with the Soviet Union: in May 1972, not long after his visit with the Chinese, he travelled to Moscow. The purpose of all this diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing was to create doubt in the minds of the leaders in each communist state about the other’s agreements with the United States: to use improved relations with the Chinese to make the Soviets more manageable and to use better relations with the Soviets to make the Chinese more conciliatory. Nixon’s strategy of détente involved extending credits to the Soviets, attempting to make them more dependent on the American technology that they so desperately needed to improve their economy, and improving trade and cultural ties. The strategy led, in the area of trade, to large sales of American wheat in 1972– approximately 25 per cent of that year’s crop—and to increased exports of a number of other American products to the Soviet Union. Detente also meant seeking areas of congruent Soviet-American interests and attempts to scale back the arms race. Significantly, out of Nixon’s innovative initiative came such successes as the first strategic arms limitation agreement, SALT, and Soviet agreement on Western access to the city of Berlin. During one of Henry Kissinger’s discussions with Premier Chou En-lai after the opening to China, Chou, who recognized the central role the containment of China played in US Vietnam policy, asked why, given the fact that the United States and his country were working out their differences, the United States still had all those troops in Vietnam. Obviously, what the grand design had failed to achieve, as Chou’s remark revealed, was positive Soviet and Chinese assistance in satisfactorily ending the Vietnam War. Apart from attempting to secure Soviet-Chinese pressure on Hanoi, Nixon’s strategy had several dimensions specific to Vietnam. One dimension was diplomatic, involving secret negotiations begun in 1969 between Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives. Another was “Vietnamization.” To defuse the debate in the United States and solidify the domestic foundations of his foreign policy, as well as to gain some leverage in the negotiations, Nixon attempted to connect the withdrawal of the hundreds of thousands of American troops to the willingness of North Vietnam to strike a face-saving deal for the United States: greater conciliation by Hanoi would bring a more rapid American withdrawal. Withdrawal—US forces were reduced by 400,000 within two years—meant turning over responsibility for the fighting to the South Vietnamese, to whom Nixon was providing huge amounts of arms and equipment. He combined this approach with removal of many of the restraints on the US military which, translated into action, meant more bombing of the north. Ultimately, because Nixon and Kissinger would not accept the North Vietnamese prescription for ending the war—which consisted of unilateral removal of all US troops, repudiation of the South Vietnamese government of President Nguyen Van Thieu, and total, decisive victory for North Vietnam— it took them four years to conclude a war that they came into office determined to end quickly. During this four-year period they approved the

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secret bombing of Cambodia, the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, which triggered violent protests in the United States and the killing by National Guardsmen of unarmed Kent State University students, the USsupported South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in May 1971, and the bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972—all of which was accompanied by the loss of 20,000 American men and approximately 600,000 Vietnamese. During the Christmas bombing of 1972, carried out to induce North Vietnamese concessions at the bargaining table and impress President Thieu with American resolve, Nixon, to quote Senator William Saxbe, seemed to “take leave of his senses.” Henry Kissinger himself referred to his policy as “calculated barbarism.” The saturation bombing conducted by the United States dealt devastating blows to targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong area, which had previously been off-limits, as well as causing the loss of at least fifteen B-52 bombers; but the strategy probably brought no better peace terms than might have been achieved the previous October. An inversion of the norm in historical writing about American wars, the historiography of the conflict in Vietnam follows a contemporary-critical, revisionist-supportive pattern—and the synthesis that is now emerging is closer to the contemporary than to the revisionist interpretations. The literature is so vast that it is possible to address only a couple of the most important themes: the morality or immorality of American involvement and the question of whether or not the United States could have won. Either directly or by implication a great many scholars have questioned the morality of American intervention in Vietnam. To some, like George Herring, who has written the best and most widely read short history of the war, the mere fact of the mistaken application of containment in that unhappy land not only undermined American interests but compromised long-standing moral ideals.23 To others, like Gabriel Kolko, a new Left historian writing in the 1960s, the extension of American hegemony in the furtherance of the structural needs of the capitalist system predicates the moral indictment.24 Frances Fitzgerald’s popular work condemns the cultural intrusion of the United States on a peasant people whose customs and traditions American officials never understood.25 Telford Taylor attacks the prosecution of the war, arguing that the bombing of innocent civilians, napalm attacks and such practices as the widespread use of chemical defoliants made American behavior particularly repugnant.26 The “revisionist” point of view—which in the context of the Vietnam War refers to the conservative defense of US policy—regards the war as highly moral in both its prosecution and its objectives. Norman Podhoretz, in Why We Were in Vietnam, states the revisionist case most forcefully, arguing that in attempting to contain communism, an evil, repressive system, the United States acted ipso facto in pursuit of a moral objective. To Podhoretz, moreover, any comparison of American military action in Vietnam to atrocities of World War II are specious: the Allied bombing of Dresden, for instance, took 35,000 lives while the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam

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took only approximately 1,500. One of the earliest and most sophisticated of revisionist works, Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam, makes the argument that not only did the United States fight in a morally defensible manner, but charges of genocide are outrageously exaggerated: the populations of South and North Vietnam, he points out, increased by 4 million and 3 million respectively over the 1965–73 period. The revisionists, aided and abetted by the conservative political ideology in vogue in the 1980s, also contend that the United States could have won the war. Some, like Lewy, argue that greater emphasis on pacification would have done the trick. Harry Summers and Bruce Palmer Jr, writing as military strategists, say that a US declaration of war on North Vietnam and a greater conventional military effort would have resulted in victory—or that a mixed strategy of a naval blockade of North Vietnam combined with an American forcing of fixed battles would have won out. Frederick Nolting, who was US ambassador to South Vietnam between 1961 and 1963, joined the revisionist school in 1988 by arguing that a more faithful adherence to Kennedy’s early strategy of support for President Ngo Dinh Diem would have changed the outcome.27 The revisionist arguments have found little support in the work of the postrevisionist scholars, who are convinced that the United States could not have won the war—at least not by any definition of winning that would have served American interests or conformed to the original objectives.28 Therein lay a central problem of the American experience in Vietnam: the balancing of means and ends. As President Nixon showed in the Christmas bombing in 1972, the United States might have gone on to devastate North Vietnam, might have gone further and “made the rubble bounce,” might have undertaken a lengthy and costly occupation of the entire country, making the United States the full-fledged successor to the French. But such an effort at “winning” would surely have substantiated historian George Santayana’s aphorism that “fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”29 Neither the American public nor American policymakers would be quick to forget the tragedy of Vietnam, and a “Vietnam syndrome” influenced foreign policy in a variety of ways for many years to come. Every potential thirdworld intervention, whether in a peripheral area like Angola or in a vital one like central America, would stimulate debate in terms of the moral and material costs of Vietnam; every invocation of America’s global mission would provoke intense questioning; every implication of America’s benevolence or the superiority of its international behavior would thenceforth bring scornful reproach. On foreign policy, consensus gave way to skepticism and uncertainty. That is the larger meaning of the Vietnam years. NOTES 1

Alexis de Tocqueville in Phillips Bradley (ed.), Democracy in America vol. I, New York, 1991, p. 267.

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2 See Melvin Small, “Public Opinion,” in Michael Hogan and Thomas G.Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, New York, 1991, pp. 165–71; James N.Rosenau, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, New York, 1961, pp. 35–41. The literature on public opinion and foreign policy is vast, done by a mix of historians and political scientists. Important studies include Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon and the Doves, New Brunswick, N.J., 1988; Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., New York, 1960; Ralph B.Levering, The Public and American Foreign Policy, 1918–1978, New York, 1978; Montague Kern, Patricia W.Levering, and Ralph B.Levering, The Kennedy Crisis: The Press, The Presidency, and Foreign Policy, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983; Leonard A.Kusnitz, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: America’s China Policy, 1949–1979, Westport, Conn., 1984; Doris Graber, Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide, New York, 1984; Terry L.Deibel, Presidents, Public Opinion, and Power: The Nixon, Carter and Reagan Years, New York, 1987. 3 Ralph B.Levering, “Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, and American Politics since the 1960s,” Diplomatic History, vol. 13, 1989, p. 385. 4 Levering, “Public Opinion,” p. 386. Ole R.Holsti and James N.Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus, Boston, 1984, chaps 1 and 2. 5 Studies critical of the Alliance for Progress include Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress, Chicago, 1970; Joseph S.Tulchin, “The United States and Latin America in the 1960s,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, vol. 30, 1988, pp. 1– 36; and Stephen Rabe, “Controlling Revolutions: Latin America, the Alliance for Progress, and Cold War Anti-Communism,” in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–63, New York, 1989, pp. 105–22. Rabe argues that the alliance was long on promises and short on delivery owing to a complex of factors including flawed planning and obstructions in Latin America. A recent essay evaluating the alliance in its Central American context provides a revisionist interpretation. See Craig Ferguson, “The Alliance for Progress and the Social Transformation of Central America,” unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Oklahoma, July 1990. 6 James G.Hershberg, “Before the Missiles of October: Did Kennedy Plan a Military Strike against Cuba,” Diplomatic History, vol. 14, 1990, pp. 173–9, 168n. Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr, Robert Kennedy and His Times, Boston, 1978, p. 482. Kennedy’s obsession with Cuba is discussed in a number of other studies as well. Among the best are Thomas G.Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War against Fidel Castro,” in Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory, pp. 123–55; Barton J.Bernstein, “Pig in a Poke, Why did Kennedy Buy the Bay of Pigs Invasion?” Foreign Service Journal, vol. 62, 1985, pp. 28–33; Thomas G.Paterson and William J.Brophy, “October Missiles and November Elections: The Cuban Missile Crisis and American Politics, 1962,” Journal of American History, vol. 73, 1986, pp. 87–119. See also Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, New York, 1987, pp. 79–176, and Warren Hinckle and William W.Turner, The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War against Castro, New York, 1981. 7 Raymond L.Garthoff, “Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Story,” Foreign Policy, vol. 72, 1988, p. 73. See also Raymond Garthoff, “The Havana Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, vol. I, 1992, pp. 2– 3. 8 Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days: John F.Kennedy in the White House, Boston, 1965; Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis, Philadelphia, Pa, 1966; Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy, New York, 1965; David A.Welch and James G.Blight, “An Introduction to the Ex Comm Transcripts,” International Security, vol. 12, 1987/8,

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p. 8. Bundy quoted in Richard Ned Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretation Reevaluated,” Diplomatic History, vol. 14, 1990, p. 473. In addition to Schlesinger and Sorensen as cited above, many former Kennedy officials have written accounts of the crisis, all in one way or another praising Kennedy’s calm and judicious handling of it. Most of them see this as JFK’s finest hour, his actions unsullied by concerns other than national interest. Among the most prominent of these works are Robert F.Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, 1969; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York, 1988; George W.Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs, New York, 1982; Theodore C.Sorenson, The Kennedy Legacy, New York, 1969; Abram Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law, New York, 1974; Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy, Garden City, N.Y., 1966; Maxwell Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, New York, 1972; and Raymond L.Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington, 1987. I.F.Stone, “The Brink,” New York Review of Books, vol. 6, 14 April 1966, pp. 12– 16; Ronald Steel, “End Game,” New York Review of Books, vol. 12, 13 March 1969, pp. 15–18; Barton Bernstein, “The Week We Almost Went to War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 32, 1976, pp. 12–21; Bernstein, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 95, 1980, pp. 97– 125; Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” pp. 471–4. Quoted in Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” p. 475. Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Galbraith quoted in Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” McNamara quoted in Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” pp. 476–7. Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, New York, 1980, p. 518. Quotations from Brigette Lebens Nacos, The Press, Presidents, and Crises, New York, 1990, pp. 59–61, 67. Johnson’s intervention in the Dominican Republic is addressed in several studies that are decidedly critical of his actions and motives. Among the critical works are Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention, Baltimore, Md, 1978; Jerome Slater, Intervention and Negotiation: The United States and the Dominican Revolution, New York, 1970; Abraham F.Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention, Cambridge, 1972. Defense of Johnson’s policy is provided in Bruce Palmer Jr, Intervention in the Caribbean: The Dominican Crisis of 1965, Lexington, Ky, 1989. Palmer sees the intervention as necessitated by a real danger of communist expansion in the western hemisphere. Quoted in David W.Levy, The Debate over Vietnam, Baltimore, Md, 1991, p. 34. Russell D.Buhite, Soviet-American Relations in Asia, 1945–1954, Norman, Okla., 1981, pp. 214–15. Quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, New York, 1976, p. 329. Congressional Record, 88th Congress, 2nd sess., 7 August 1964, p. 18471. William L.Lunch and Peter W.Sperlich, “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 32, 1979, pp. 21–32. Congressional Record, 90th Congress, 1st sess., 29 January 1968, p. 882; Fulbright to Huey Cochran, 30 January 1968, Fulbright Papers, University of Arkansas Library, Fayetteville, Arkansas; William A.Armbruster, “The Pueblo Crisis and Public Opinion,” The Naval War College Review, vol. 23, 1971, pp. 87–9. Jonathan Schell, “Reflections, The Nixon Years—VI,” New Yorker, vol. 51,7 July 1975, pp. 46–7. There are a number of recent scholarly works on Kissinger and Nixon that not only assess the grand design but achieve a high degree of balance. Among the best of these are Robert D.Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of

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Russell D.Buhite Diplomacy, New York, 1989; Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, New York, 1989; Richard Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years: The Reshaping of American Foreign Policy, New York, 1989; Herbert Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, Boston, 1990; and Joan Hoff-Wilson, “Nixingerism, NATO, and Detente,” Diplomatic History, vol. 13, 1989, pp. 501–26. George C.Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950– 1975, New York, 1979. Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose, Boston, 1969. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston, 1972. Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Chicago, 1970. Harry G.Summers Jr, “Lessons: A Soldier’s View,” in Peter Braestrup (ed.), Vietnam as History: Ten Years after the Paris Peace Accords, Washington, D.C., 1984, pp. 109–14; Harry G.Summers Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Novato, Calif., 1982; Bruce Palmer Jr, The 25 Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam, Lexington, Ky, 1984. See also Robert A. Divine, “Vietnam Reconsidered,” Diplomatic History, vol. 12,1988, pp. 79–93; Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy: The Political Memoirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy’s Ambassador to Diem’s Vietnam, New York, 1988. See, for example, George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam, New York, 1986. A good critique of the “win” perspective and summary of the literature may be found in Thomas G. Paterson, “Historical Memory and Illusive Victories: Vietnam and Central America,” Diplomatic History, vol. 12, 1988, pp. 1–18. See esp. the note on p. 6. Quoted in Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern, p. 387.

9

From détente to the Gulf Walter LaFeber

Recent United States foreign policy has been a search to find solutions for a series of problems that erupted between 1971 and 1974. These problems, of course, did not suddenly appear during those years; they had deep historical roots running back into the 1960s and beyond. By 1974, however, they were so obvious and dangerous that they shaped the political agenda for the next generation. The foreign policies of presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush can be interpreted as varied responses to these dangers. The dangers, however, were ultimately removed neither by these policies nor even by the collapse of the communist bloc in 1989–91. By the mid-1980s, a decade of perspective enabled historians and policymakers to begin to understand the depth of the problems. In his history of the Cold War, America’s Half-Century, Thomas J.McCormick believed US power in world affairs reached “high tide” in the 1960s, but “in the near-decade” between 1968 and the American Bicentennial in 1976, the United States began to bear a striking resemblance to Great Britain a century earlier: while remaining the world’s greatest power, “the United States nevertheless showed clear evidence of decline in its capacity to perform its functions as center” for the world’s capitalist system. Power, especially of the economic variety, flowed away from Americans who found themselves unable to enjoy the living standards they had assumed to be their birthright before the 1970s.1 Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers also argued that the United States might be following Britain’s example as a declining nation. Placing his argument in five hundred years of history, and demonstrating that a number of empires began their decline when they over-invested in military power instead of economic productivity, Kennedy argued that the Soviets faced a far greater danger of decline than did Americans, but that the United States faced a sad future if it could not halt the economic downturn that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s.2 A number of similar books that appeared in the 1980s triggered a wideranging debate over how various foreign policies might solve these problems. Many analysts, however, refused to accept the thesis that America was in decline. Samuel P.Huntington argued that the most profound problems dated only from the early 1980s, that they were results “not of the American 145

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economy, but of Reagan economics,” and that they could therefore be easily solved by changing President Reagan’s misguided policies. Huntington added that while other powers, such as Japan and West Germany, had grown economically powerful, the United States continued to hold about the same percentage of world economic activity in the 1980s as it enjoyed in the late 1960s; little actual decline was evident. He especially, however, disputed Kennedy’s thesis that US military spending had undermined the nation’s wellbeing. Americans’ determination to over-consume and under-save had actually weakened their system: “If the United States falters economically, it will not be because U.S. soldiers…stand guard” in Germany, but “because U.S. men, women, and children overindulge themselves in the comfort of the good life. Consumerism, not militarism, is the threat to American strength.”3 These accounts marked the boundaries of the debate that evolved after the early 1970s. Most histories of the 1970s and 1980s, it should be noted, sharply differed from those analyzing the pre-1972, actually pre-1969, years because of the types of documentation available. In studying foreign policy before Nixon, scholars have exploited the rich materials opening at the various presidential libraries; the millions of pages of formerly top-secret documents at the Lyndon B.Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, for example, have made possible dozens of excellent books on Vietnam, and the sources have been supplemented by the release, in however censored and unfortunate a form, of US Department of State papers in Foreign Relations of the United States, a series that has reached the early 1960s. For post-1969 materials, however, the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidential libraries are only slowly starting to release important foreign policy documents. Carter’s personal diary, for example, remains largely closed. Many State, Defense, and Central Intelligence Agency documents can be found in the valuable Declassified Documents Quarterly (DDQ), a service accessible to many university libraries that makes the important documents that have been declassified each week at the presidential libraries and government agencies available on microfiche. But the DDQ materials are not systematic, edited, or, often, complete, and must be used with care. The student studying the post-1973 years therefore must provide proper context for the DDQ material with at least three other types of sources. First is memoir material by former officials. In certain instances, for example, the books by Carter administration officials that are noted in detail below are valuable and various points of view emerge clearly. Other memoirs, such as Henry Kissinger’s two volumes, are detailed and important, but have not been sufficiently balanced by authoritative books of other officials who had different points of view. Some memoirs, such as those of Presidents Ford and Reagan, offer little new that is important to students. A second type of available materials comprises accounts by journalists who have sources inside various governments and the means to obtain key documents. Seymour Hersh’s scathing critique of Kissinger’s diplomacy, and Jane Mayer’s and Doyle McManus’s detailed analysis of Reagan’s stumbling

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policies after 1984, are examples. At the Highest Levels, by Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, was written from privileged access inside both the United States and former Soviet governments to provide the most detailed analysis of the historic 1989–91 years, including the destruction of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, that we shall probably have for a generation. The danger with such accounts is that they usually rely on privileged interviews with former officials who might not, or might not want to, remember accurately what they did and said when in power. Moreover, the necessary documents to check such interviews remain closed. In the case of Beschloss and Talbott, this meant that they primarily based their book on information provided by those they talked to, or who would talk at length with them; this meant, in turn, that the authors missed the highly important Defense Department point of view that regarded Soviet policy from a different perspective than that of the White House and the State Department. Without documentation that is systematic and as complete as possible, even good journalism can have problems as history.4 The third type of material can be found in certain newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer that think of themselves as newspapers of record and have skilled reporters stationed worldwide. Ideologically, these journals cover a narrow political spectrum, with the Boston Globe perhaps the most liberal and the Chicago Tribune the most conservative. Newsweek, Time, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New Republic, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, and Harper’s are among respected periodicals that publish foreign affairs articles, but the student using them understands that, unlike the better newspapers, they often do not pretend to present a detailed record of events and usually advance sharp points of view that, while offering important perspectives, must be used with care. And yet, even without the necessary documents, it is necessary to come to terms with the post-1972 years because they so clearly mark a fundamental turn in twentieth-century history. Before the early 1970s, the United States had enjoyed overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons and was easily able to pay its own expenses. It dominated the international economy and feared few challengers. By 1971, however, President Nixon declared in a speech in Kansas City, Missouri that a new era was emerging. Instead of one or two superpowers, world affairs were being shaped by “five great economic superpowers”—the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Western Europe, and China—four of whom challenge Americans “on every front.” If they did not want to suffer the fateful decline of ancient Greece and Rome, Nixon warned, Americans had to understand that “economic power will be the key to other kinds of power” in the future, and that their power would depend on how well they disciplined themselves to win that economic race. Nixon’s view of history was a partial preview of McCormick’s and Kennedy’s arguments. Nixon spoke from bitter experience. Burdened by the tremendous costs of the Vietnam War and resulting inflation, in 1971, for the first time since 1894,

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the nation suffered an unfavorable balance of merchandise trade. Americans were becoming less competitive in the vital international marketplace. Eyeing re-election in 1972, the president took four major steps to try to correct the growing problems. First, he understood that the United States was no longer strong enough economically to back the dollar, the only real international currency, with gold, as it had since 1945, because its gold supply was running out as the metal was used to pay debts overseas. Nixon instead announced that the dollar would “float”—that is, would be left to the whims of the marketplace where private business and other governments could directly influence its worth. Next, he began to pull troops out of Vietnam and by 1973 accepted a peace that was advantageous to the communists in North Vietnam. Third, as he withdrew US troops, Nixon pushed others to pick up the burden—in the Pacific he asked more from Japan, in the Middle East he designated the willing Shah of Iran. Finally, in historic trips to Beijing and Moscow, Nixon set in place a détente policy that aimed at arms control and friendlier economic relations. By playing Chinese off against Russians, and vice versa, the president believed he had found a cheaper means of containing the two communist giants. But “King Richard” had a brief reign. In 1973, Congress discovered that the president had committed a criminal act by trying to cover up a crime: the burglarizing of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington’s Watergate Hotel by White House agents in June 1972. In August 1974, Nixon avoided possible impeachment by becoming the first person to resign the presidency. Until 1973 the presidency was, without doubt, the world’s most powerful office—in part because it controlled the globe’s greatest military power, in part because Americans trusted the president. But that trust had been betrayed, and had been betrayed, moreover, just after the previous five presidents led the nation into the disastrous Vietnam conflict. Congress responded by passing the War Powers Act. For the first time since the founding of the Republic, the legislative branch tried in a systematic way to restrict the president’s ability to commit troops to a possible or actual conflict.5 The War Powers Act never became as effective as its supporters hoped, but the presidency had nevertheless been weakened. Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s Imperial Presidency appeared in 1973 to chronicle the historical rise of the strong Chief Executive and the beginnings of its fall. The book helped trigger a major debate among historians. Critics observed that Schlesinger’s book was less coherent than it should have been because as a liberal Democrat he wanted a strong presidency to reform American society at home, but he also wanted a weaker executive that could not secretly or singlehandedly take the nation into war overseas. This distinction between domestic and foreign affairs, however, was becoming quite blurred. A strong domestic president who could control Congress and special public-interest groups so as to make reforms at home could too easily roll over Congress and public opposition in order to conduct a militant policy abroad. The United

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States domestic economy, moreover, was becoming so integrated into a world economy—for example, the dependence of American automobile owners on Middle East oil—that Schlesinger’s distinction between the two was becoming meaningless. The real question, as Johnson’s former National Security Council adviser, McGeorge Bundy, pointed out, was how an overmilitarized and over-extended foreign policy was returning home to bring down the imperial presidency. A key part of the answer, as Theodore Draper noted in his Present History, was how Nixon and his chief foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, tried to cover their activities at home and overseas in an attempt to save the policies and, indeed, the Nixon administration itself.6 Even if, therefore, the 1973 War Powers Act never worked as its authors hoped, the political arena in which the “imperial president” had grown so dominant was transformed. The president remained the world’s most powerful figure, but he was increasingly being held accountable by a more aggressive Congress and new public groups who discovered how to lobby Congress effectively. Theodore Lowi, in his book The Personal President, saw dangers in this new situation. When tied up by Congress or the special interest groups, Lowi warned, the President could try to break loose with a spectacular overseas exploit, even a war, because historically the American people had almost always supported their Chief Executive in overseas adventures—even when such adventures failed. Congress was not able to stop such sudden presidential acts, Lowi noted, and therefore it would be dangerously tempting for presidents to get a political fix, as Lowi called it, for their political fortunes by striking out militarily abroad. This interpretation helped explain a number of US foreign adventures after 1972 that are noted below, including Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 and Bush’s decision to send 27,000 troops into Panama in late 1989. Lowi’s book provided insight into how and why the post-1972 presidency was becoming more, not less, active.7 Certainly Nixon’s and Kissinger’s foreign policies were highly active in the Middle East in late 1973 after Egypt attacked Israel. When Washington aided Israel and pushed its allies to do the same, Arab oil producers retaliated by placing an embargo on vital oil shipments to the United States and some of its allies. As gasoline prices tripled, runaway inflation threatened western economies. Kissinger, whom Nixon had named secretary of state just before the war erupted, began to loosen the oil producers’ grip by negotiating a truce in the war, and then working secretly with the Shah of Iran and other nonArab producers to obtain large amounts of oil. Americans discovered that grave dangers now came not from just the communist military giants but from regions the French termed “the Third World,” or the less industrialized but mineral-rich nations. Areas such as the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and South Asia were becoming vital markets and sources of raw materials for the United States. But these regions were themselves undergoing tremendous change and instability as they tried to develop.8 Historians have concluded that Kissinger and Nixon left a mixed legacy in foreign affairs. By 1974–5 their policy of détente with the Soviets was

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collapsing. The policy was in part the victim of Congress’s refusal to approve the economic deals that Nixon had made in Moscow that underpinned the political and arms-control agreement. The policy was also set back by the intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union on opposite sides of a growing, brutal, civil war in the east African nation of Angola that was freeing itself of Portuguese colonialism. Stephen Ambrose, in his standard biography of Nixon, appreciates the president’s skilled breakthrough to China in 1971– 2 and to the Soviet Union in 1972, but emphasizes the difficulty Nixon had in measuring and adjusting to the domestic restraints on his power. That difficulty led him first to secret diplomacy, then to criminal acts, and finally to resignation.9 Before coming to power, Kissinger had fully realized, as he had written beforehand, that obtaining sufficient domestic support was the “acid test” for a statesman in a democracy. As Robert Beisner noted, however, “Kissinger failed the ‘acid test’…because he stepped outside the constraints imposed by the American political tradition without [being able to reshape] that tradition itself.” Roger Morris, once a close aide of Kissinger, resigned after his boss and Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1970 to expand the war in Southeast Asia. Morris then became an important historian of the Nixon-Kissinger policies. He argued that Kissinger was brilliant in devising global strategies to deal with the new, post-1972 world that was emerging, but painfully deficient in understanding the domestic restraints on US officials, and he was to be criticized for his willingness to deceive Congress and the public, and sometimes even his own staff, as Kissinger attempted to break out of these restraints.10 In his two volumes of memoirs, Kissinger provided the most passionate and detailed response to such criticisms. He claimed that fundamental problems for the rational conduct of foreign affairs are built into the US political system, especially in terms of the public’s tendency to swing back and forth between wanting to follow a tough interventionist policy and then, as in Vietnam or Africa, wanting to pull out rapidly and concentrate on issues at home. Kissinger also argued that Americans, without the long historical experiences of Europeans, did not appreciate the necessity to follow complex balance-of-power policies that required subtlety, patience, and, often, direct confrontation with those, such as the Soviets and their communist satellites, who tried to upset the global balance of power—a balance that was, after all, in favor of the United States. The inability of Americans to understand their world, Kissinger concluded, often forced leaders like himself to work secretly with other nations to maintain the proper balance. He argued that at times these associates could even include the Russians and Chinese because they shared with Americans the fear of instability, especially disorder that could lead to nuclear confrontation; moreover the communist giants had strong governments that, unlike even democratic regimes in such areas as Europe or Latin America, could deliver on their promises. Critics, led by Walter Isaacson and Seymour Hersh, countered by pointing out that Kissinger’s secretive and

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devious approach undermined the public’s long-term confidence in his and other officials’ policies. The one topic on which these criticisms were muted was Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in 1973–4 when he succeeded in stopping the Middle East war and starting a peace process. But as critics, led by Raymond Garthoff, pointed out, even this success came at a high price: by working successfully to shut Soviet influence out of these peace talks in the Middle East, and in other areas such as southern Africa and especially Angola, Kissinger angered Moscow and helped undermine the détente that he and Nixon had so painfully put into place.11 These criticisms have been brought into one detailed volume, Isaacson’s Kissinger. Basing his book on 150 interviews as well as declassified documents (although too few from Nixon’s and Kissinger’s papers, which remain under their own control and largely closed), Isaacson has written the standard biography of the man and a highly influential analysis of the 1969– 76 policies. Kissinger remained as secretary of state under Nixon’s appointed successor, Gerald R.Ford, who served as president from August 1974 until January 1977. The new president and Kissinger negotiated arms-control deals with the Soviets in 1975, but Congress refused to ratify them. As Steven Rearden has explained, a longtime government official, Paul Nitze, led conservative arms experts who blasted the 1975 deal for allowing the Soviets to enjoy an advantage in the largest rockets. Detente was rapidly giving way to a renewal of the Cold War, a war fought especially in the Third World. Kissinger lamented that the United States had to fight this war with new disadvantages, including a weaker presidency and an assertive, but disorganized, Congress. The father of the US containment policy against the Soviets, however, disagreed; George Kennan believed that although Congress and the public could certainly act irresponsibly, US officials themselves had refused to meet the Soviets half-way, especially in restraining the development of the most dangerous strategic nuclear weapons, during both 1956–61 and the post-1972 years.12 Over this intense discussion of how to come to terms with the new, post1972 world perched the ghost of the US defeat in Vietnam. Kissinger constantly tried to exorcise this ghost by arguing that the tragedy in Southeast Asia must not prevent Americans from using military force to defend their interests elsewhere in the world. A few scholars tried to help Kissinger by arguing that the Vietnam struggle had indeed been misunderstood. Guenter Lewy, for example, believed the conflict was no more shameful than America’s other twentieth-century wars, and he blamed US political and military officials for failing to devise a winning strategy. Others believed the United States had actually been winning the war until the media, especially television, turned Americans against the effort after early 1968. Historian Robert Divine, however, spoke for many by arguing that the conflict was indeed different, and dangerous, because there had been no clear-cut declaration of war and no convincing case made by the government for the

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terrible commitment.13 Of special importance, a detailed, authoritative US Army history concluded that, overall, the media had actually supported the war throughout most of the 1960s, and that Vietnam had been lost because of problems of political and military strategy coming out of Washington, not because of misleading television news coming out of New York.14 The ghost of Vietnam continued to haunt Americans, but at least the specter was more clearly defined: it was a tragedy caused not by some imagined media conspiracy or antiwar groups but by top officials who did not understand either the revolutionary situation they were entering in Vietnam or the very limited patience of the American people to support a long-term, costly, distant war. This new definition of Vietnam, arising out of the historiographical debate after the war, directly shaped US foreign policies after 1974, especially the realization on the part of officials, and notably the American military, that if they again used force abroad, it had to be short, decisive, and with clearcut and obtainable objectives. After narrowly defeating Ford in the 1976 election, President Jimmy Carter tried to expel the ghost of Vietnam quite differently than had Kissinger. Understanding how Americans had come to mistrust their national governmental institutions, Carter successfully portrayed himself as an outsider—a former Georgia governor with no Washington experience. Carter further concluded that he could both restore the confidence of Americans in their government and give himself a useful diplomatic tool by taking a high moral position—that is, by advocating “human rights” of political prisoners and the oppressed around the world. Supporting human rights could also place Americans on the side of democratic practices in the Third World and within the communist bloc. Patricia Derian received the task of directing humanrights policy in Carter’s State Department.15 Her efforts, historians have argued, were soon undercut by contradictions within the president’s foreign policies. Gaddis Smith pointed out that Carter wanted to achieve other foreign policy objectives more than he did those that concerned human rights. As Smith saw it, the president was pulled in different directions by the principles of morality, that is, pushing human rights, coming to diplomatic settlements with the Soviets and other opponents, and simply building up military strength to overpower those opponents. Carter, for example, welcomed Soviet dissidents and former political prisoners to the White House until, as Stephen Cohen noted, an angry Moscow government cooled relations with the United States and began cracking down harder on internal dissenters. In the Middle East, as James Bill has argued, the Shah of Iran was one of the world’s worst offenders against human rights, but Carter ignored the Shah’s transgressions because he needed Iran’s oil and military cooperation. In Central America, as historians Tommie Sue Montgomery and Lars Schoultz have observed, the president imposed sanctions against El Salvador’s bloodthirsty regime, especially after Salvadoran soldiers raped and murdered four American women, including three nuns, in 1980. When, however, revolutionaries opened an offensive to topple the Salvadoran regime,

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Carter sent aid to prevent the Leftists from gaining power. US officials could never discover a workable human-rights policy.16 Carter also tried to put his foreign policy on a new course, while simultaneously dealing with the ghost of Vietnam, by downplaying the threat of communism. “Being confident of our own future.” he declared at Notre Dame University, “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” Vietnam, he added, was “the best example” of such “intellectual and moral poverty.”17 Those words reflected the views of his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who believed that the United States had to give priority to working with the more democratic factions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, regardless of whether these factions were in power or helped by communists. Vance believed that Carter had to take political risks to settle US problems with third-world nations. This approach drove Carter and Vance to sign the historic Panama Canal treaties in 1977, which promised to turn over the canal to Panama in the year 2000, while protecting US interests in the region. Congress, after intense debate, passed the treaties by the bare two-thirds vote needed. As Burton Kaufman argues, Carter justifiably took credit for succeeding over bitter opposition from Americans who did not want to give back a foot of the strategic waterway that Theodore Roosevelt seized three-quarters of a century earlier. Carter and his supporters noted that the canal was too small for large oil-tankers and aircraft carriers, and it was not worth the blood that Panamanian nationalists seemed willing to shed to gain the canal region.18 The real debate in the United States pivoted on the question of whether the Americans should retain the right to defend the canal through military intervention, if necessary, both before and after Panama was to take over the waterway. On this key point, as historian Michael Hogan noted, Carter’s critics believe that it was congressional leaders, not the White House, that seized the initiative at a critical moment to hammer out the wording that gave the United States that right of intervention, but did not totally alienate the Panamanian government. The critics saw this episode as an example of how, even when Carter had the correct policy, he lacked the political skills to achieve it without rancor and political cost.19 By mid-1978, that is, just after Congress ratified the Panama Canal treaties, Vance’s views were losing out to the quite different policies of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Council Adviser, who believed the Soviets posed the great danger. Brzezinski viewed third-world problems in the traditional anti-communist context of post-1945 US policy, and he disagreed with Vance’s emphasis on the less industrialized world. The candid memoirs published by Vance, Brzezinski, and Carter provide striking insights into the Vance-Brzezinski contest for the capture of Carter’s foreign policies. They also provide the most detailed histories available on the Carter administration’s foreign policies. Brzezinski is outspoken in believing he was correct in pushing Carter to extend formal diplomatic relations to China in

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1979 as a counterpoise to the Soviets, and also in arguing for a showdown with the Soviets when they attempted to work closely with Ethiopia’s revolutionary government on the strategically important east coast of Africa. Vance, for his part, opposed closer relations with China because he believed they needlessly worsened ties with the Soviets, who feared being surrounded by a possible US-Chinese alliance. The secretary of state also argued that Africans could best settle African affairs, and that the east coast of the continent, especially the strategic “Horn of Africa” containing Ethiopia and Somalia, was not worth a superpower conflict. Of special importance, he wanted to treat the arms-control talks with the Soviets as separate from all other issues, in the belief that nothing was as important as preventing possible nuclear annihilation. Brzezinski, however, insisted on “linkage”—which meant, in effect, that the Soviets should not receive a SALT II deal until they promised to behave in such third-world areas as Africa.20 Most historians have concluded that Carter’s foreign-policy problems were caused mainly by his inability to chart a consistent policy between the Vance and Brzezinski positions. When the president confronted a worsened US economy, and foreign-policy crises erupted, he moved closer to his NSC adviser’s hard-line views. For example, in 1977, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a joint statement on Middle East policy, but in mid-1978 Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt without consulting the increasingly angry Russians. The turn in the Carter years, however, occurred most vividly in January-February 1979 when the Shah was driven from power in Iran, oil prices leaped upward, and the American economy declined. As gasoline prices rose 55 per cent in six months, the annual inflation rate, out of control since the early 1970s, reached 13 per cent in mid1979, the highest rate since 1946. The crisis worsened in November 1979 when Iranian mobs, angry that Carter had allowed the Shah into the United States for medical treatment, stormed the US embassy and seized seventy-six hostages. Fifty-three were held throughout 1980 as Americans grew more frustrated and Carter prepared to run for re-election. Without any help from the Soviets, events in a third-world nation threatened the American system’s economic and political foundations. The published memoirs of the officials involved once again show how the Carter administration was nearly paralyzed by divisions. In Iran the most notable split occurred between US Ambassador William Sullivan, who thought the Shah was a lost cause and wanted to open relations with Ayatollah Khomeini, who ultimately overthrew the Shah, and Brzezinski’s NSC, especially Gary Sick who was the specialist on Iran. Sick wanted the Shah to fight to the end against the Ayatollah and, in his own account of the crisis, accused Sullivan of not following instructions and of misleading the Carter administration by means of the dispatches he sent from Iran. Carter’s biographer, Burton Kaufman, believes that “Sick was basically correct in his accusations.” Above all, however, Kaufman argues that “the manner in which President Carter responded to the crisis pointed to one of the fundamental

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problems of his entire administration.” Instead of either pushing the Shah toward full-fledged resistance or, on the other hand, cutting a deal with the increasingly powerful Ayatollah Khomeini, “Carter chose instead to waffle.”21 As Iran turned bitterly anti-American, the president’s problems were compounded when the Soviets invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979 to save a pro-Moscow regime. The president issued a “Carter doctrine” warning that he would use force, if necessary, to keep the Soviets away from the strategically valuable, oil-rich Persian Gulf. The CIA secretly began sending aid to the Afghanistan resistance forces. Carter imposed economic sanctions against the Soviets and tried to convince his west European and Japanese allies to follow suit. They refused to do so; indeed, West Germany completed a new twenty-five-year trade agreement with Moscow. Carter’s attempts to shore up the European alliance system seemed also to be crumbling because of failures to agree on arms-control procedures and the proper policies toward Iran and the Soviet Union. More fundamentally, as Stephen Gill observes, between 1973 and 1977 Brzezinski and New York banker David Rockefeller had realized the long-term structural damage that was weakening the western alliance. They tried to buttress US foreign policy by creating the Trilateral Commission. The Commission included representatives from Japan and Western Europe. It aimed to bridge the foreign policy differences among the three most powerful industrial hubs in the world, and to work out coordinated economic policies before trade wars erupted. The Trilateral approach, however, never worked effectively—as the Afghanistan crisis demonstrated. Growing economic and political strains, exemplified in West Germany’s unwillingness to impose sanctions, gravely weakened the attempts to coordinate the policies of the three industrial regions.22 In April 1980, Vance resigned as secretary of state because he believed that a plan developed by Carter and Brzezinski to use military forces to free the hostages in Iran would fail and possibly lead to war with the Ayatollah’s government. The rescue effort ended tragically in the Iranian desert before US troops could reach the hostages, whom the Iranians finally freed in January 1981. In his memoirs, Vance accused Brzezinski’s policy, aimed at isolating and encircling the Soviet Union, of being a major reason why Moscow decided to invade Afghanistan: the Soviets had little “more to lose” in their relations with Washington.23 Brzezinski was now free to push his anti-Soviet policies, and the frustrated, angry Carter listened. The president had promised in 1976 to cut up to $7 billion from the military budget, but now proposed a $20 billion increase. He had once promised to reduce arms sales to other nations, but now approved sales at a near-record pace of $15 billion. He authorized the building of two of the most destructive nuclear weapons ever devised, the multi-headed MX missile and the Trident II submarine. Carter had begun his presidency by emphasizing human rights and promising to cut back the arms race. What had caused this stark reversal, this “tragedy” of the Carter administration, as Haynes Johnson characterized the president’s failures? Some analysts argue that Carter failed to master

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Washington’s politics—that is, he lost control of policy because he did not know how to form coalitions, manage the media, or define a vision that inspired others to follow.24 Other scholars, however, believe Carter’s problems went far beyond his political or operational style. Having no overall idea of how he wanted to accomplish his foreign policy objectives, he first tried an emphasis on human rights, then tried to work out arms deals with increasingly suspicious Russians, then excluded the Soviets from the Middle East talks, then took a hard-line military position in 1979–80. Unable to reconcile contradictions within his own early policies, such as human rights, and unable to choose between or reconcile the quite different perspectives of Vance and Brzezinski, Carter became confused, some historians argue, until he finally cut through his problems by reverting to a militarized, cold-war set of policies in 1979–80.25 In analyzing American mood swings and how they shaped US foreign policy in the 1970s and 1980s, Terry Deibel notes that during the 1980 presidential campaign Americans feared a “loss of control”; an unprecedented 84 per cent agreed that the nation was in “deep and serious trouble.”26 The nation badly wanted some good news. Ronald Reagan gave it to them. His most important speech writer, Peggy Noonan, afterwards wrote in an important memoir of the Reagan administration that the new president “was probably the sweetest, most innocent man ever to serve in the Oval Office.” Born and educated in Illinois, Reagan was able to talk so effectively with Americans, and dominate their politics during the 1980s, because he embodied so much of the American dream. He began his career broadcasting baseball, where he learned the fundamentals of becoming a “great communicator,” as he was to be known in the White House, then headed west where he found fame and wealth in that most American of pursuits, along with baseball, the movies.27 Historians largely agree that Reagan, especially during his first term, successfully sold most of his foreign policies because he knew how to talk to the American people and, as well, because he emphasized military strength and anti-communism in which Americans had devoutly believed since at least 1945. As Noonan emphasized in her book, Reagan’s strength was not intellectual; he had, after all, once criticized California universities for “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.”28 In domestic affairs his call-to-action amounted to an appeal to the marketplace and individual initiative that justified two massive tax cuts for individuals and corporations between 1981 and 1986. More secure in their pocketbooks, Americans listened to Reagan’s traditional appeal in foreign policy: the Soviet Union, he emphasized, was an “evil empire” that alone disturbed a world that would otherwise be at peace. Reagan, unlike Carter in his early presidential years, made the world a simple confrontation between good and bad, somewhat like the plots in many western films. Historian Robert Dallek noted how Reagan’s domestic and foreign messages came seamlessly together: “Those upwardly mobile, middle class Americans who make anticommunism an extension of their fight for greater

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personal freedom at home also derive a sense of status from their militancy against the Soviets abroad.” Reagan’s “emotional patriotism,” moreover, aimed “to compel a revival of respect for America overseas.”29 Other analyses of the Reagan presidency quickly noted how foreign leaders came to fear the president’s nationalistic and militant approach. Two distinguished experts on Western European affairs, Gordon Craig and Alexander George, quoted Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany: “We can afford no gestures of strength and no doughty demonstrations of steadfastness. We’ve had a noseful of that sort of thing!”30 Reagan countered that Americans had to overcome the hesitations of such Old-World leaders as Schmidt and confront the Soviets directly. This could be done only after the US military was built to new levels. Between 1981 and 1986 the military budget nearly trebled to almost $300 billion each year, and Reagan used it with little concern for his allies in Western Europe and Japan. After rejecting Leonid Brezhnev’s proposal for talks in 1981, the president reiterated his dislike of the SALT II arms agreement of 1979, made between Carter and Brezhnev, because he believed it was not sufficiently tough on the Soviets. Strobe Talbott’s analysis of Reagan’s policies toward the Soviets demonstrated the president’s lack of knowledge: he was unaware, for example, of how dependent Soviet nuclear strategy was on the largest missiles, and consequently was puzzled when he urged that these missiles be sharply limited, only to have Moscow flatly reject his proposal. Talbott also emphasized how Reagan viewed arms control not as a give-and-take negotiation but as a policy “to dictate to the USSR an entirely new sort of arsenal” that destroyed those largest Soviet weapons without comparable US reductions.31 The high point of Reagan’s anti-Moscow offensive occurred in March 1983 when, despite limited consultation with his advisers, he announced that his administration was committed to building a space-based defense system—a system which, when fully developed after years of research and many billions of dollars in expenditures, would supposedly shoot down incoming nucleartipped missiles before they could hit the United States. The intense, extended debate during the next decade over this Strategic Defense System (SDI)—or “Star Wars,” as it was soon termed—actually moved little beyond the early positions for and against. Supporters of SDI believed that it could make nuclear war between the superpowers impossible; they believed this to the extent that Reagan said he would even share the technology with the Soviets, and that it would at the least protect the United States against nuclear threats from smaller, more primitive powers who had only a few bombs. Opponents argued that the Soviets would only build more missiles to overwhelm an SDI system and thus condemn the world to an all-out arms race. Scientists, led by Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe and Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, argued that the technology breakthroughs necessary for such a system—for example, a perfectly functioning computer that could accurately identify enemy missiles from decoys and instantly, and without glitches, shoot them

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down—was impossible to devise. Others argued that smaller powers would simply sneak nuclear weapons into the United States in ships or other kinds of subterfuge.32 Nevertheless, between 1983 and 1992, Congress agreed to invest between $2 billion and $4 billion annually into SDI before presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton severely cut back the project in 1992–3. During Reagan’s term, “Star Wars” seemed to be an answer to the problems that had become prominent during the 1971–4 years: it promised to provide Americans with absolute security, and it had further appeal because, as historian Garry Wills noted, this new-found security would derive from “a unilateral American effort that does not depend on the goodwill or the nervous doubts of allies.”33 This determination to act independently characterized Reagan’s policy. In 1982, for example, he unilaterally sent 1400 marines into Beirut, Lebanon, ostensibly to separate the invading forces of Israel, armed by the United States, and Syria, armed by the Soviet Union. On 23 October 1982, a terrorist blew up 239 American soldiers in their barracks. Reagan vowed not to retreat, but he soon began to pull out the troops. He covered the humiliation in Lebanon by immediately using force on the small Caribbean island of Grenada, where he had refused to negotiate with a pro-Cuban government. The Grenada invasion was badly conducted. US troops had to refer to tourist maps to find targets; its costs included twenty American, twenty-four Cuban, and forty-five Grenadan lives; and it was criticized even by Reagan’s close friend Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister of Great Britain. But the consensus among historians is that although the invasion was badly conducted, Americans gloried in the episode as a sign that they were overcoming their Vietnam-inspired fear of using military force.34 A forceful critique of Reagan’s foreign policies, placed within historical context, was offered by former Undersecretary of State George Ball. He observed that the mid-1980s movie hero was, quite appropriately, “Rambo,” who exemplified “a fervent commitment to physical violence as an instrument for the easy solution of complex problems,” and who had “a compulsion to operate alone without regard for international constraints,” much like “the lone cowboy who disdainfully conducts his own shootout.” This was a traditional form of American isolationism, deeply rooted in history, because, in US foreign policy, isolationism has never meant simply staying at home—the American economy, for example, would never allow that kind of isolationism. It has meant instead freedom-of-action and a determination, if necessary, to go it alone and not be restrained by allies, such as West Europeans who disliked such use of military or economic power. As Ball pointed out, since 1970 this kind of go-italone-if-necessary approach had forced the United States to become increasingly isolated in the United Nations. Before 1970, US officials did not have to cast a veto in the UN Security Council to stop measures they disliked; but after 1970 fifty-two US vetoes had been cast, and thirty, or 57 per cent, occurred between 1981 and 1988. Other nations had not joined the United States on any of those thirty vetoes.35

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In 1984–5 came the turn. After spending nearly $1 trillion on weapons in just four years, Americans found themselves trapped in a growing governmental debt that was increasing to more than $100 billion annually. More debt was added to US accounts during the Reagan years than during the first two hundred years of American history. As resources poured into weapons, competitiveness in civilian goods, automobiles, electronics declined, and US trade deficits grew. In 1985, for the first time since 1914, Americans were indebted to the rest of the world. By 1987, they surpassed Brazil and Mexico to be the globe’s greatest debtor. Congress began to reduce the president’s arms requests. By 1985, George Kennan, who had devised the “containment” theory, now argued, “What most needs to be contained...is not so much the Soviet Union as the weapons race itself.”36 In the spring of 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union. He represented a new generation that, unlike the old, was trained in the professions, had some experience in the West, and understood that the communist system was not keeping up with the technological revolution. Gorbachev undertook to restructure the system (perestroika) while opening and invigorating it (glasnost); but he intended to make these changes while maintaining the Communist Party’s control of the state. Beginning in November 1985, Gorbachev and Reagan held a series of summit conferences that slashed the number of nuclear weapons on both sides and helped to bring about Soviet troop withdrawal from Eastern Europe and Afghanistan; for the first time since 1972 a thaw in the Cold War occurred. As Gail Lapidus and Alexander Dallin observed, in words that most analysts accepted, not only the Russians had changed, but Reagan, facing severe economic and political constraints, had to forget his views about the “evil empire” and strike deals with the new communist leader.37 Even as Americans began to make settlements with the Soviets, however, problems in the Third World continued to perplex officials. Reagan was determined not only to contain but to roll back communist influence in the less industrialized world: “Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy” on “every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua,” he announced in 1985. Columnist Charles Krauthammer named this pledge to drive back Soviet-supported regimes in Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Cambodia the “Reagan doctrine.” Supporters, including Krauthammer, noted how the doctrine dealt with the post-1972 problems, for it aimed to drive back communist influence through relatively cheap, low-level counterinsurgency conflicts that—unlike Vietnam—would not disturb Americans by costing them many dollars or US lives. Critics, such as Robert Tucker and Michael Klare, warned that the Vietnam involvement had begun exactly this way, and that the American ability to “democratize” other peoples was limited.38 The Reagan doctrine worked in Afghanistan, however, where covert aid to the Afghan resistance helped force Soviet troops to begin returning home in 1988. It was less effective in Angola and Cambodia, and failed in Nicaragua to drive the Sandinista government from power before Reagan left office.

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Indeed, in Central America the doctrine nearly brought down the Reagan administration. That story had its origins in late 1981 when the president secretly ordered the CIA to begin a massive covert campaign to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government. In 1979 the Sandinistas had destroyed the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship, which had long been supported by Washington. Reagan’s effort was part of a larger plan to block the revolutions that were also sweeping through the neighboring nations of El Salvador and Guatemala. By 1985, however, the CIA’s attempts to create an effective force of Nicaraguan “Contras” had failed. Congress, appalled by the Contras’ humanrights atrocities and military disasters, cut off funding. Lt-Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council worked with CIA and State Department officials to circumvent Congress by raising funds for the Contras from private sources. As part of this effort, North and other officials broke US laws by selling arms to Iran, which since 1979 had sought to destroy American power in the Middle East, then sending the profits from the arms sales to the Contras. When discovered, North and other officials broke more laws by lying to Congress and destroying documents. Investigations concluded that Reagan had probably not violated laws, but his anti-communist zeal, combined with his lazy, inefficient oversight of the administration, had created a constitutional crisis that 57 per cent of Americans believed was as threatening as the Watergate scandal of 1972–4 that drove Nixon from office.39 Reagan left the presidency in early 1989 after working with Gorbachev to reduce the danger of nuclear holocaust and to improve Soviet-American relations to their best condition since World War II. Few US politicians, some historians argued, could have accomplished this as effectively—especially given his continued personal popularity, despite Iran-Contra scandals, and his immunity to attacks from right-wing, anti-Soviet Americans. 40 Critics, however, note how his administration failed to come to terms with other post1971 legacies. The economy staggered under huge debt, was mired in low growth, suffered from energy inefficiency, especially when compared with the Japanese and German economies, and depended on as much imported oil as in 1973. The Reagan doctrine triumphed in Afghanistan, but failed in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.41 George Bush brought a new energy to the presidency in 1989, as well as deep experience and wide knowledge in foreign policy. He had served as ambassador to the United Nations, US representative in China, and head of the CIA before becoming vice president in 1981. The new Chief Executive, who had grown up politically in the Cold War, saw the US-Soviet relationship as central, and was willing to use force to create a pro-American order in the Third World. Between 1989 and 1991, however, the world that Bush had known largely disappeared. In 1989–90, Gorbachev allowed communist regimes in Eastern Europe to be replaced by democratic governments, and—to the shock of many both outside and inside the Soviet Union—tore down the hated wall that

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divided West and East Berlin. He then allowed the two Germanies to reunite in mid-1990. Eighteen months later Gorbachev himself was removed from power by democratic Russian factions headed by Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union disintegrated. The ability of presidents such as Truman, Reagan, and Bush to gain public support for their foreign policy on the basis of opposing communism now disappeared, along with communism itself in most parts of the world. Without anti-communism as a rallying cry, without a Soviet danger on which to focus, Bush had to find other means to rally Americans around his policies. He could not find those means, nor could he discover the policies that would resolve the problems propelling the United States into one of its worst post-1945 economic recessions. Historians have begun to judge Bush’s role in the historic events of 1989– 91. The judgments overall have been quite critical. The most detailed, authoritative account is Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels. Based on interviews with top officials in the American and former Soviet governments, the authors demonstrate that Bush committed two major errors. First, he was too slow in supporting Gorbachev because the president could not overcome his cold-war mentality and work with Gorbachev at a time when the Soviet leader might have moved his country more successfully toward economic and political reform. Second, when Bush finally realized that Gorbachev had to have strong support if he were to begin meaningful democratic reforms, the president swung over to his side—but it was too late. By that time a more democratic movement, led by Boris Yeltsin, was on the rise; Gorbachev’s days in power were numbered. Gorbachev tried to save himself in early 1991 by bringing back to power some of the disreputable communists who had led the country into stagnation in the early 1980s. Bush nevertheless continued to side with Gorbachev. The White House let it be known that US officials considered Yeltsin too “boorish” and unpredictable. In August 1991, Soviet military and Communist Party leaders tried to overthrow Gorbachev and destroy Yeltsin. But Yeltsin and his supporters stopped the coup, gained power, and removed Gorbachev as head of the government. The Soviet Union disappeared and its former empire fractured into eleven republics that formed a Commonwealth of Independent States. Beschloss and Talbott, along with other observers, believe that Bush made these errors in part because he could not break free from his belief that the Cold War would continue in some form, and in part because he allowed his diplomacy to be determined by personal friendships, especially with Gorbachev after 1989, rather than by any rethinking of longterm US interests and Soviet realities.42 The Soviet collapse did allow Bush to utilize military force more easily in several areas of the Third World. In December 1989 the president invaded Panama with 27,000 troops to destroy the regime of Manuel Antonio Noriega. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Bush had worked closely with Noriega, but by 1989 the Panamanian’s refusal to cooperate on Central American policy, his corruption and drug-running, his proximity to the Panama Canal, and— perhaps especially—his personal taunting of Bush, led the president to capture

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Noriega and, in a historic and controversial move, bring him to the United States for trial.43 Noriega was sentenced to a long prison term. A more dangerous crisis erupted in August 1990 when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops conquered the oil-producing kingdom of Kuwait. The two nations had fought for decades over borders and oil wells. Bush hesitated, then decided to block any Iraqi move toward Saudi Arabia, the most important and oil-rich friend of the United States among Arab nations, to liberate Kuwait, and to destroy Saddam Hussein’s capacity to produce nuclear and chemical weapons. Dispatching 550,000 US troops, and masterfully creating and maintaining UN support, Bush destroyed much of the Iraqi army and liberated Kuwait in a 100-hour war in February 1991. His popularity leaped to all-time highs for twentieth-century presidents. But the honeymoon was short-lived. Investigations discovered that Bush’s own misjudgments about Saddam Hussein had led the United States during the late 1980s to help build the Iraqi war machine as a counterforce to Iran. The president, moreover, had stopped the war before US and UN forces destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity or the dictator himself.44 “By God,” Bush announced after the victory, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”45 But not quite. The Vietnam experience haunted US officials who had feared a long, costly war, and who thus used overwhelming firepower to kill thousands of Iraqi civilians and 100,000 Iraqi soldiers in order that Americans back home would not condemn the war for lasting too long. Memories of Vietnam influenced US officials, especially those in the military who vividly recalled the embarrassments of the early 1970s in Southeast Asia and from antiwar protests at home. Nor did Americans think they any longer had the money to finance the war adequately. Their post-1971 economic problems now forced Bush to ask for money from allies, including $11 billion from an unwilling Germany and $13 billion from a reluctant Japan. Having become highly energy-efficient, the Germans and Japanese had less interest than Americans in fighting for Middle East oil. President Bush repeatedly decl